I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought of myself as proxying other people’s traffic by carrying my iPhone around. (For one thing, it’s my own phone that initiates all the activity- it monitors for Apple devices, the devices don’t reach out to my phone.) I can see how you could frame it that way, though. I just thought they might be referring to something else that I didn’t know about.

I remain skeptical. I can understand how one would might see it that way, but I think it’s stretching the word proxy too far.

Devices on Apple’s Find My aren’t broadcasting anything like packets that get forwarded to a destination of their choosing. I would think that would be a necessity to call it “proxying”.

They’re just broadcasting basic information about themselves into the void. The phones report back what they’ve picked up.

That doesn’t fit the definition to me.

I absolutely don’t mind the fact that my phone is doing that. The amount of data is ridiculously minuscule. And it’s sort of a tit for tat thing. Yeah my phone does it, but so does theirs. So just like I may be helping you locate your AirTag, you would be helping me locate mine. Or any other device I own that shows up on Find My.

It’s a very close to a classic public good, with the only restriction being that you own a relevant device.