I remember when they came out I figured how dangerous it can be if it was left in the wrong hands.
Regarding the “an air tag is following you” you need to realize it only works on the newer iOS and doesn’t work with any other phone such as android which many people have. So you can only rely on that audible sound however like in the article if this is placed inside a car, it would be difficult to hear.
Wondering if they will be removed from the market.
Topic: Stalkers’ “chilling” use of AirTags spurs class-action suit against Apple (Read 95 times)
December 09, 2022, 12:13:35 AM
December 08, 2022, 02:57:40 PM
I'm surprised it hasn't become more common to install air tags (and gps trackers) on vehicles, bikes, motorcycles and scooters. To make them easier to trace in the event of being stolen or hijacked.
It's becoming more and more popular already,
https://www.berginsight.com/the-number-of-active-consumer-asset-tracking-devices-in-europe-and-north-america-to-reach-28-million-in-2026
I personally know people that have installed a tracker on their dog leash, and their small kid belt, and not even counting the number of guys putting one in their bikes. I have a GPS tracker in my car, but mainly for insurance purposes, the yearly cost is offset by the 20% off.
But overall I think that more of my inner circle friends have put them on their pets than everything else combined.
Unfortunately, violence and homicides are also on the rise. Is there an option for RFID or GPS implants which would make a missing person easier to trace if they were kidnapped or killed?
Active RFID needs a battery source, and passive RFID has very low ranges, if you put a person in a basement or behind two concrete walls there is no chance for the emitter to pick up the signal even if you're literally standing at the door of the kidnapper.
An active GPS needs also a battery and is far bulkier, you can't possibly inject those.
The only thing like this on the market is a double solution, an RFID chip injected and a GPS emitter that communicates with the passive chip and sends the data, but that needs to be carried in a pocket or a backpack, and for sure the kidnappers of rich kids will strip them naked and throw it away. Then the implant becomes useless. In short, it will help you if your husband has taken the kids when he wasn't supposed to do so, but it won't stop a real professional kidnapper or a gang.
Quote
Quickly after releasing AirTags, the complaint says that immediately, Apple was inundated with “chilling” stalking reports, including stalkers sewing AirTags into clothing to evade discovery.
Common, if you have a stalker that is capable of sewing into your clothes you have bigger problems than him tracking you.
December 08, 2022, 02:36:46 PM
-snip-
Apple probably thought they had found a empty market to fill up with their own exclusive product.
Believe it or not there are people who can be kind of distracted by nature and usually lose their stuff around their house or workplace, I can see what Apple tried to go for but they did not consider the consequences this product could have if misused.
If I lost my keys, I would still be happy if I could find them instead having a replacement, since I would fear the remote possibility someone entered my home.
December 08, 2022, 02:15:11 PM
This sounds exactly like the kind of product that Steve Jobs would kill after he returned to the company in the 90's. It sticks out like a sore thumb in Apple's ecosystem, and isn't even a piece of sophisticated technology (unlike the Apple Watch or AirPods). It's a key-finder for God's sake.
Easiest solution is to just get your keys copied and hide a spare one somewhere. Even my grandma does that. So I don't see why the world's most valuable company can't understand this.
Easiest solution is to just get your keys copied and hide a spare one somewhere. Even my grandma does that. So I don't see why the world's most valuable company can't understand this.
December 07, 2022, 12:00:34 PM
Quote
Class action covers anyone in the US who owns iOS or Android devices.
When Apple released AirTags in 2021, the small electronic tracking devices were touted by top executives as being “stalker-proof.” Since then, Vice reported a minimum of 150 police cases documenting stalkers using AirTags, and there have already been two severe stalking cases involving AirTags that ended in murder in Ohio and Indiana.
Confronted by police reports and concerns from privacy advocates, Apple released updates in February, claiming that new features would mitigate reported stalking risks. Stalking reports kept coming, though, and it increasingly seemed to victims that Apple had not done enough to adequately secure AirTags. Now, Apple is being sued by two women who claim that the company is still marketing a “dangerous” product.
In the complaint filed yesterday in a federal court in California, the women suing Apple say that AirTags have become “one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers.” It has become the “weapon of choice,” they say, because the small size makes the devices hard to detect, the accuracy of Apple’s location tracking is “unparalleled,” and the $29 price is extremely affordable. Victims say that stalkers can effectively track them, and if the device gets deactivated, AirTags are easy to replace at the next opportunity.
These AirTags are supposed to work by emitting Bluetooth signals to Apple’s massive “Find My” network of connected devices, accurately reporting the location of a missing AirTag to the owner. The coat button-size tracking devices can be easily clipped to key rings or dropped in purses to help owners recover lost items.
But the AirTags are also so small that they can easily go undetected, especially when stalkers alter the devices to make them harder to find. For one woman suing, Lauren Hughes, her ex-boyfriend allegedly used a Sharpie to color the AirTag and hide it inside the wheel well of her car. The other woman suing, who remains anonymous out of fear for her physical safety, found an AirTag that her “estranged husband” had allegedly planted in her child’s backpack. When she removed the device from the backpack, it was soon replaced by another.
Lawyers representing the women suing did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Apple previously acknowledged “reports of bad actors attempting to misuse AirTag for malicious or criminal purposes,” describing in a blog how the company had partnered with law enforcement to help trace AirTags back to the stalkers who owned them. They also said they worked with safety groups to take other steps to prevent unwanted tracking and promised to release a “series of updates” before the end of this year. So far, Apple has not made any mention on its blog of those updates and did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment on whether those updates are still expected to be released in 2022.
The lawsuit Apple now faces is not just about two women being harassed by stalkers using AirTags. It’s a class-action lawsuit that represents all persons residing in the United States who own iOS and Android devices, as well as other sub-classes at risk of stalking.
Plaintiffs suing represent various stalked classes. They are asking for a jury to assess whether, in addition to injunctive relief and damages, Apple should owe punitive damages for allegedly releasing a defective product with insufficient safeguards to prevent stalking, then profiting off sales after allegedly misleading the public to believe AirTags were “stalker-proof.”
“This is problematic for all Class members, as they are unlikely to learn of the dangers associated with AirTags until they have become victims of stalking,” the complaint states.
AirTag safeguards against stalking deemed deficient
The complaint alleges that the Apple AirTag has “revolutionized” location-based stalking by creating a tool with the sole purpose of transmitting its location to its owner and then dismissing warnings from privacy experts to “consider its inevitable use in stalking.” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, described AirTags as “uniquely harmful” and was quoted in the complaint as saying that “the network that Apple has access to is larger and more powerful than that used by the other trackers. It’s more powerful for tracking and more dangerous for stalking.”
Quickly after releasing AirTags, the complaint says that immediately, Apple was inundated with “chilling” stalking reports, including stalkers sewing AirTags into clothing to evade discovery. Soon, Apple was “scrambling to address its failures in protecting people from unwanted, dangerous tracking,” the complaint says.
One of the earliest solutions from Apple was providing text-based notifications for iOS users, alerting them when there was an “AirTag Found Moving With You.” However, users couldn’t always trust this alert was accurate—or referring to an AirTag device located near them in a crowd—and they couldn’t always find the tracking device, even if they knew it existed. For Android users, the situation was even bleaker because Apple had no way to send automatic alerts. Android users, thus, became “nearly defenseless to tracking/stalking using an AirTag,” because the only way to find out was to proactively download an app called Tracker Detect and manually search for AirTags.
“Any Android owner who downloads Tracker Detect must decide when and where to scan for AirTags—something a person being unknowingly tracked would be unlikely to do,” the complaint states.
Another solution that Apple has implemented is playing sound notifications when an AirTag is detected, chiming an alert at 60 decibels (“as loud as a normal conversation between two people,” the complaint says). This is not an effective solution, the complaint says, for hearing-impaired people or anyone located in a loud environment when the warning sounds. It also doesn’t help when stalkers cleverly place the device out of hearing range. In Hughes’ case, with an AirTag hidden in the wheel well of her car, she’d likely never hear the warning chime, and when she attempted to engage the AirTag feature to chime when she was searching for the hidden device, the chime only rang once.
Women suing say that even if the text and sound notifications were effective solutions for iOS users, stalkers have already found a way around the safeguard. “Silent AirTags” are sold on e-commerce sites like Etsy and eBay, the complaint says, disabling the speaker that is supposed to protect vulnerable targets of stalking. (A recent Ars review found "silent AirTags" for sale on Etsy, but not eBay.)
In addition to these features, Apple also promised more updates yet to be announced in 2022. These include “precision finding” to help victims using iPhone 11, iPhone 12, and iPhone 13 to locate unwanted trackers, as well as syncing text alerts with sound alerts to “help in cases where the AirTag may be in a location where it is hard to hear, or if the AirTag speaker has been tampered with.” They also promised “to use more of the loudest tones to make an unknown AirTag more easily findable.”
The most troublesome aspect of Apple relying on alerts like these to prevent stalking—rather than proactively designing a product that cannot be used by stalkers—is that these alerts are typically substantially delayed. Sometimes victims have been tracked for days before they received an alert, which would give a stalker plenty of time to note their new address or frequented locations. Apple has said that it will release an update “to notify users earlier that an unknown AirTag or ‘Find My’ network accessory may be traveling with them,” but has not yet clarified if that ever happened.
For now, victims like the women suing expect they will remain in danger of being unknowingly tracked as long as AirTags are sold as currently marketed.
“The risks involved with a product like this being abused still seem like they far outweigh the convenience of finding a misplaced set of keys,” the complaint says.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/apple-airtags-are-now-the-weapon-of-choice-for-stalkers-lawsuit-says/
When Apple released AirTags in 2021, the small electronic tracking devices were touted by top executives as being “stalker-proof.” Since then, Vice reported a minimum of 150 police cases documenting stalkers using AirTags, and there have already been two severe stalking cases involving AirTags that ended in murder in Ohio and Indiana.
Confronted by police reports and concerns from privacy advocates, Apple released updates in February, claiming that new features would mitigate reported stalking risks. Stalking reports kept coming, though, and it increasingly seemed to victims that Apple had not done enough to adequately secure AirTags. Now, Apple is being sued by two women who claim that the company is still marketing a “dangerous” product.
In the complaint filed yesterday in a federal court in California, the women suing Apple say that AirTags have become “one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers.” It has become the “weapon of choice,” they say, because the small size makes the devices hard to detect, the accuracy of Apple’s location tracking is “unparalleled,” and the $29 price is extremely affordable. Victims say that stalkers can effectively track them, and if the device gets deactivated, AirTags are easy to replace at the next opportunity.
These AirTags are supposed to work by emitting Bluetooth signals to Apple’s massive “Find My” network of connected devices, accurately reporting the location of a missing AirTag to the owner. The coat button-size tracking devices can be easily clipped to key rings or dropped in purses to help owners recover lost items.
But the AirTags are also so small that they can easily go undetected, especially when stalkers alter the devices to make them harder to find. For one woman suing, Lauren Hughes, her ex-boyfriend allegedly used a Sharpie to color the AirTag and hide it inside the wheel well of her car. The other woman suing, who remains anonymous out of fear for her physical safety, found an AirTag that her “estranged husband” had allegedly planted in her child’s backpack. When she removed the device from the backpack, it was soon replaced by another.
Lawyers representing the women suing did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Apple previously acknowledged “reports of bad actors attempting to misuse AirTag for malicious or criminal purposes,” describing in a blog how the company had partnered with law enforcement to help trace AirTags back to the stalkers who owned them. They also said they worked with safety groups to take other steps to prevent unwanted tracking and promised to release a “series of updates” before the end of this year. So far, Apple has not made any mention on its blog of those updates and did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment on whether those updates are still expected to be released in 2022.
The lawsuit Apple now faces is not just about two women being harassed by stalkers using AirTags. It’s a class-action lawsuit that represents all persons residing in the United States who own iOS and Android devices, as well as other sub-classes at risk of stalking.
Plaintiffs suing represent various stalked classes. They are asking for a jury to assess whether, in addition to injunctive relief and damages, Apple should owe punitive damages for allegedly releasing a defective product with insufficient safeguards to prevent stalking, then profiting off sales after allegedly misleading the public to believe AirTags were “stalker-proof.”
“This is problematic for all Class members, as they are unlikely to learn of the dangers associated with AirTags until they have become victims of stalking,” the complaint states.
AirTag safeguards against stalking deemed deficient
The complaint alleges that the Apple AirTag has “revolutionized” location-based stalking by creating a tool with the sole purpose of transmitting its location to its owner and then dismissing warnings from privacy experts to “consider its inevitable use in stalking.” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, described AirTags as “uniquely harmful” and was quoted in the complaint as saying that “the network that Apple has access to is larger and more powerful than that used by the other trackers. It’s more powerful for tracking and more dangerous for stalking.”
Quickly after releasing AirTags, the complaint says that immediately, Apple was inundated with “chilling” stalking reports, including stalkers sewing AirTags into clothing to evade discovery. Soon, Apple was “scrambling to address its failures in protecting people from unwanted, dangerous tracking,” the complaint says.
One of the earliest solutions from Apple was providing text-based notifications for iOS users, alerting them when there was an “AirTag Found Moving With You.” However, users couldn’t always trust this alert was accurate—or referring to an AirTag device located near them in a crowd—and they couldn’t always find the tracking device, even if they knew it existed. For Android users, the situation was even bleaker because Apple had no way to send automatic alerts. Android users, thus, became “nearly defenseless to tracking/stalking using an AirTag,” because the only way to find out was to proactively download an app called Tracker Detect and manually search for AirTags.
“Any Android owner who downloads Tracker Detect must decide when and where to scan for AirTags—something a person being unknowingly tracked would be unlikely to do,” the complaint states.
Another solution that Apple has implemented is playing sound notifications when an AirTag is detected, chiming an alert at 60 decibels (“as loud as a normal conversation between two people,” the complaint says). This is not an effective solution, the complaint says, for hearing-impaired people or anyone located in a loud environment when the warning sounds. It also doesn’t help when stalkers cleverly place the device out of hearing range. In Hughes’ case, with an AirTag hidden in the wheel well of her car, she’d likely never hear the warning chime, and when she attempted to engage the AirTag feature to chime when she was searching for the hidden device, the chime only rang once.
Women suing say that even if the text and sound notifications were effective solutions for iOS users, stalkers have already found a way around the safeguard. “Silent AirTags” are sold on e-commerce sites like Etsy and eBay, the complaint says, disabling the speaker that is supposed to protect vulnerable targets of stalking. (A recent Ars review found "silent AirTags" for sale on Etsy, but not eBay.)
In addition to these features, Apple also promised more updates yet to be announced in 2022. These include “precision finding” to help victims using iPhone 11, iPhone 12, and iPhone 13 to locate unwanted trackers, as well as syncing text alerts with sound alerts to “help in cases where the AirTag may be in a location where it is hard to hear, or if the AirTag speaker has been tampered with.” They also promised “to use more of the loudest tones to make an unknown AirTag more easily findable.”
The most troublesome aspect of Apple relying on alerts like these to prevent stalking—rather than proactively designing a product that cannot be used by stalkers—is that these alerts are typically substantially delayed. Sometimes victims have been tracked for days before they received an alert, which would give a stalker plenty of time to note their new address or frequented locations. Apple has said that it will release an update “to notify users earlier that an unknown AirTag or ‘Find My’ network accessory may be traveling with them,” but has not yet clarified if that ever happened.
For now, victims like the women suing expect they will remain in danger of being unknowingly tracked as long as AirTags are sold as currently marketed.
“The risks involved with a product like this being abused still seem like they far outweigh the convenience of finding a misplaced set of keys,” the complaint says.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/apple-airtags-are-now-the-weapon-of-choice-for-stalkers-lawsuit-says/
....
I'm surprised it hasn't become more common to install air tags (and gps trackers) on vehicles, bikes, motorcycles and scooters. To make them easier to trace in the event of being stolen or hijacked. Theft and crime appear to be on the rise. With the advent of the internet and satellite technology it has become easier than ever to make difficult to replace items theft proof.
Unfortunately, violence and homicides are also on the rise. Is there an option for RFID or GPS implants which would make a missing person easier to trace if they were kidnapped or killed?
For women who fear airtags being used to stalk them. Is there an alternative to a faraday cage which might be used to disrupt RFID or bluetooth tracking. It is known that some hotels have cellphone signal disruptors. Long story short, I'm certain someone else probably would have thought about and came up with a solution long before I thought of it, if it were viable? Then again, maybe not?
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