WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Companies have been trying to tie up online and offline purchase behaviours and data for years, and this seems like it plugs that gap for the benefit of the company.
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Samsung has debuted the IoT card, a credit card that can help the company track your activities even if you leave your smartphone at home – perhaps to help them better identify your habits for advertising purposes or track cross channel payments and collect higher quality payment data – that works with SmartThings Find.
That’s great if you live in South Korea, where the company offers it in partnership with KB Kookmin Card and American Express – so far, Samsung hasn’t announced a similar offering in the US. We’ve asked if it plans to and will update this post if the company responds.
The IoT card works like you’d expect it to. You add it to SmartThings Find, and then, like with Apple Find My, other Samsung devices that detect it will report its location back to you. This works whether the card is nearby or its owner has left it in another country. Samsung says the card uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for this, rather than ultra wideband, which SmartThings Find can also use.
In the US, if you want to do something similar, you’re not out of options. You could cram an Apple AirTag or a Samsung SmartTag into your wallet or pick up one of the many other tracking alternatives that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. How useful they are depends on whether they use UWB, BLE, or both (UWB enables precision finding, which BLE lacks) and what tracking network they use.
They’re also not all created equal. AirTags tend to work pretty well for the most part, for instance, while anecdotally, second-gen AirPod Pros often just won’t show up in Apple’s Find My app at all.
