One year after their launch, Apple Inc's (NASDAQ: NASDAQ:AAPL) AirTag tracking smart tags are already being widely used for harassment and stalking purposes — mostly against women.
What Happened: Apple's AirTag was meant to prevent your keys, wallet or purse from being lost or help you find those items if they were misplaced, but police records reveal that they are being used to stalk women, according to a Vice report.
Vice analyzed 150 police reports mentioning the AirTag over eight months and found that less than half actually dealt with robbery or theft of smart tag-equipped objects. Instead, 50 cases were women calling the police after getting notifications about being tracked by an AirTag that they do not own, 25 of them identifying a man in their lives such as a former partner, husband or even boss whom they suspected was behind the tracking.
Most cases involved angry exes, with one woman calling to report that her former partner slashed her tires and left an AirTag in her vehicle to monitor her movement, while another said a man who was harassing her planted such a device in her car and threatened to make her life hell.
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For many of the women, a major red flag was seeing their exes appear whenever they left the house. One woman, in particular, kept spotting her former partner following her — once even cornering her — until she took her car to a mechanic who found the AirTag planted in the vehicle.
In other cases, women were monitored by their current partners, with some becoming physically violent when confronted about the planted AirTags. Only one of the reports involved a man being stalked by his former girlfriend with the Apple device.
Furthermore, police have indicated that AirTags are being used by sex traffickers, but there is no publicly available data to confirm the claims. While Apple implemented a feature warning people who are carrying around an AirTag that is not registered with their account with a notification, no warning is displayed for those who do not own an iPhone.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said that "stalking and stalkerware existed before AirTags, but Apple made it cheaper and easier than ever for abusers and attackers to track their targets."
The news follows recent reports that a Tennessee man was arrested for attaching an Apple Watch to his girlfriend's car — with the presumed intention of tracking her.
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