Amber Norsworthy, 32, lives in Mississippi with her four children. On December 27, she arrived home at 3:00 pm. As soon as she arrived, she received a notification on her phone.
“My phone made a noise I had never heard before,” she says.
The notification told her that an unknown device was tracking her movements.
Norsworthy opened the ‘Find My’ app on his iPhone.
“The app showed me my entire route. It said ‘the last time the owner saw your location was at 3:02 pm’ and I thought, ‘that’s it now, I’m home’.”
She called the police, who told her they didn’t know what to do. She still hasn’t found the device, which she believes is somewhere in her car. She says Apple customer support was able to confirm that it was an AirTag. “I keep my eyes wide open now,” she says.
The BBC spoke to six women in the US who say they have been tracked using Apple AirTags.
The button-sized devices are designed to work with Apple’s ‘Find My’ network to locate lost items. But there have been several reports in the US of these devices being used to track people.
Apple told the BBC: “We take customer security very seriously and are committed to the privacy and security of AirTag.”
The company also says that AirTags have more security features than competing products. However, there are growing signs that they are being used for criminal activity in the US.
Apple released AirTag last April. They are small and round, and are inspired by other tracking products on the market, such as Tile.
The idea is that they can be attached to suitcases or keys — anything you might lose. You can track an item to within 30 centimeters. But in the wrong hands, they can be used for a different purpose.
“If you create an item that is useful for tracking stolen items, you also create a perfect tool for stalking,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“I’ve personally talked to several people who found AirTags among their stuff,” she says.
Apple was aware, long before AirTags were released, that they could be used for criminal activities. When launching them, Apple said that “AirTags are designed to track items, not people”.
They took a number of measures that they said would protect people from being tracked.
People with an iPhone would be alerted if an unregistered AirTag was moving with them. And AirTags should beep when separated from an owner for a period of time.
In December, the company also released an app that Android users can download. Tracker Detect allows users who are not on the iOS operating system to be notified of an unauthorized AirTag.
But, for various reasons, many people believe that these measures are not enough.
Anna Mahaney is from Georgia. She was alerted to an unknown device after she went to the mall.
“I was really scared and went to try to disable it. Every time I did that, it said it couldn’t connect to the server.” She went to an Apple Store, where they suggested that she should turn off her location settings.
When he went to the local police, they told him that there was another similar report in his area. She believes the device is somewhere in her car.
The BBC spoke to six women who say they have been tracked with AirTags. One said she had found an AirTag stuck inside a bag. Others were unable to locate the tags.
All questioned whether Apple is even doing enough to stop its products from tracking people.
Apple says AirTags will beep between 8 and 24 hours after a device is detected moving with an unregistered phone. But it’s easy to register an AirTag and deactivate it.
According to Anna Mahaney, Apple support told her that could be why she couldn’t find the AirTag: “It looks like what might have happened in my case was that the person who owns the AirTag tracked me down until I got home , and then they turned off the AirTag.”
This isn’t the only flaw in Apple’s AirTag. Apple’s app, designed for Android users to find an unwanted AirTag, has been downloaded by a small percentage of Android phones.
The BBC asked Apple the number of times the app was downloaded from Google Play, the Android app store.
Apple did not reveal the data, but Google Play puts the number at around 100,000 downloads. To put this in context, there are around three billion active Android devices around the world.
Apple says that if you don’t have an iPhone, people will be notified another way: with a beep sound that plays after an unwanted AirTag is detected. But there are problems with that too.
“AirTags emit a beep at 60 decibels which is very easy to drown out.” says Eva Galperin. “I could muffle it just by closing it in my fist. I could muffle it by placing it between two couch cushions. It’s impossible to hear it by putting it, say, under the bumper of the car.”
And the noise only starts after eight hours. Critics argue that by then it is too late.
In Bloomingdale, Illinois, police warned locals about AirTags.
“We thought it was important to notify people in our community that this is an issue.” says Frank Giammarese, director of public safety at Bloomingdale Police.
“The technology is great, but unfortunately some people use it for evil.”
There is an argument that Apple is being unfairly criticized. It is easy to buy tracking devices on the internet.
The BBC asked the maker of its main competitor, Tile, what it was doing to protect the public from being tracked with its devices. Tile responded that it was “developing a solution” that would identify an unknown device close to people. But this solution has not been released yet.
The other side of the argument is that AirTags work fine when located by a registered iPhone. The ‘Find My’ network uses nearly a billion Apple devices worldwide — and their Bluetooth connectivity — to create long-range, accurate tracking.
“I want Apple to require these devices to ask for permission before you can be followed,” says Anna Mahaney. “With ‘Find My Friends,’ if my husband wants validation, I have to approve. I can’t understand why a stranger can follow me without my consent.”
Amber Norsworthy believes AirTags shouldn’t be sold until Apple can figure out how to better alert people: “They should stop selling them for a period of time until they can set some safety limits.”
Eva Galperin believes that Apple needs to create better security measures: “I want them to work with Google to give Android the same level of automatic detection in the background as they already have for the iPhone.”
The BBC took these criticisms to Apple, who said: “We take customer safety very seriously and are committed to AirTag’s privacy and security. If users feel their security is at risk, they are encouraged to contact with local authorities, who may work with Apple to provide any available information about the unknown AirTag.”
.
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
