Popular Apple AirTags used as a high-tech stalking tool?
On a Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend’s home in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: “AirTag Detected Near You.”
An AirTag is a 1.26-inch disc with location-tracking capabilities that Apple started selling last year as a way “to keep track of your stuff.”
Estrada, 24, didn’t own one, nor did the friends she was with. The notification on her phone said the AirTag had first been spotted with her four hours earlier. A map of the AirTag’s history showed the path Estrada had driven across the city while running errands.
“I felt so violated,” she said.
Estrada is not alone. In recent months, people have posted on TikTok, Reddit and Twitter about finding AirTags on their cars and in their belongings. There is concern that the devices may be abetting a new form of stalking, which privacy groups predicted could happen when Apple introduced the devices in April.
The New York Times spoke with seven women who believe they were tracked with AirTags, including a 17-year-old whose mother placed one on her car to stay apprised of her whereabouts.
Some authorities have begun to take a closer look at the threat posed by AirTags. The West Seneca Police Department in New York recently warned its community of the tracking potential of the devices after an AirTag was found on a car bumper. Apple complied with a subpoena for information about the AirTag in the case, which may lead to charges, West
Seneca police said.
And in Canada, a local police department said that it had investigated five incidents of thieves placing AirTags on “high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them.”
Researchers believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices then report where an AirTag was last seen. Unlike similar tracking products from competitors such as Tile, Apple added features meant to prevent abuse, including notifications like the one Estrada received and automatic beeping. (Tile plans to release a feature to prevent the tracking of people this year, a spokesperson for that company said.)
Apple does not disclose sales figures, but the $29 AirTags have proved popular, selling out consistently since their unveiling.
An Apple spokesperson, Alex Kirschner, said in a statement that the company takes customer safety “very seriously” and is “committed to AirTag’s privacy and security.”
Police could ask Apple to provide information about the owner of the AirTag, potentially identifying the culprit. But some of the people who spoke with The Times were unable to find the AirTags they were notified of and said police do not always take reports of the notifications on their phones seriously.
Estrada, who got the notification while in Los Angeles, eventually found the quarter-sized tracker lodged in a space behind the license plate of her 2020 Dodge Charger. She posted a video of her ordeal on TikTok, which went viral.
Estrada said she was told by a Los Angeles police dispatcher that her situation was a nonemergency and that if she wanted to file a report she’d have to bring the device with her to the station in the morning. She didn’t want to wait and disposed of it after taking several photos.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles police told The Times that the department had not heard of cases in which an AirTag had been used to track a person or a vehicle. But Estrada said that after she posted her TikTok video, an Apple employee, acting on their own, contacted her. The employee was able to connect the AirTag to a woman whose address was in central Los Angeles.
In June, after concerns about stalking were raised, Apple pushed an update to AirTags to cause them to start beeping within a day of being away from their linked devices, down from three days.
A person who doesn’t own an iPhone might have a harder time detecting an unwanted AirTag. AirTags aren’t compatible with Android smartphones. Last month, Apple released an Android app that can scan for AirTags, but you have to be vigilant enough to download it and proactively use it.