This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple's negligence, AirTags have become "one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers" because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine "real-time location information to track victims."
Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an "explosion of reporting" showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area—Tulsa, Oklahoma—alone, the complaint said.
This seeming escalation is concerning, plaintiffs say, because Apple allegedly has not done enough to mitigate harms, and AirTags stalking can lead to financial ruin, as victims bear significant costs like hiring mechanics to strip their cars to locate AirTags or repeatedly relocating their homes. AirTags stalking can also end in violence, including murder, plaintiffs alleged, and the problem is likely bigger than anyone knows, because stalking is historically underreported.
"Consequences have been as severe as possible: multiple murders have occurred in which the murderer used an AirTag to track the victim," their complaint alleged. One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then "followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene."
Most of the plaintiffs reside in the US, alleging significant costs and harms incurred from alleged AirTags stalking in 20 states. Two plaintiffs reside in Canada—including a recent high school graduate—and one plaintiff currently lives in Ireland. Many report that stalkers using AirTags are abusive partners or exes—hiding AirTags in linings of purses, car wheel wells, or even stitched inside a child's teddy bear—but others report being stalked by a "mystery person" with unknown motives.
According to their complaint, tracker technologies like AirTags—which are designed to help people locate lost or stolen items—"allow stalkers to follow their victims’ movements in real time and to undo any attempt on the part of the victim to evade or hide from the stalker." Plaintiffs claimed that AirTags are among products that have "revolutionized the scope, breadth, and ease of location-based stalking" because every Apple device is part of the company's expansive tracking network that's being abused by stalkers.
"What separates the AirTag from any competitor product is its unparalleled accuracy, ease of use (it fits seamlessly into Apple’s existing suite of products), and affordability," their complaint said. "With a price point of just $29, it has become the weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers."
Victims suing alleged that Apple knew that AirTags could be used by stalkers but advertised them as "stalker-proof" anyway. Then, when its "stalker-proof" protections were "exposed as totally inadequate," Apple had to scramble for the past two and a half years to "address its failures in protecting people from unwanted, dangerous tracking," their complaint said.
Despite Apple's steps to enhance safety features—including adding iOS alerts when AirTags are nearby, chimes installed in AirTags that help victims detect and locate hidden AirTags, and an app called "Tracker Detect" that victims with Android phones can use to scan for AirTags—plaintiffs have alleged that AirTags remain dangerous.
One plaintiff, Georgia resident Brittany Alowonle, reported that she and her daughter were being stalked by someone using AirTags within the past two weeks "without knowing by whom or why." Although she cannot locate the AirTags, she receives daily alerts from Apple and chimes from the AirTags that confirm that the AirTags are still there. These chimes, to Alowonle, only signal that she's being perpetually watched.
"Every day, I am reminded that me and my daughter are not safe," Alowonle said in the complaint, which noted, "if one’s location is constantly being transmitted to an abuser, there is no place to run."
One Irish national, À€ine O’Neill, had been living in California while launching a Hollywood career that was just taking off when she found AirTags inexplicably being used to monitor her every move. She gave up her career and moved back to Ireland, feeling that she had "no way of revealing the identity of her stalker or properly gauging the level of danger she was in."
"While she is now 5,157 miles away from her unknown stalker, she is that same distance away from her lifelong dream," the complaint said.
Victims have alleged that Apple's acts and practices violate federal and state laws, claiming that Apple negligently released a defective product and was unjustly enriched while invading the privacy of every victim unwittingly being tracked on its expansive network of devices. They've asked the court to award damages to all persons in the US who own iOS or Android devices, which includes classes of users who were stalked, as well as those who were allegedly at risk of stalking. They also seek a court order "enjoining Apple from further unlawful, unfair, and/or fraudulent practices with respect to the design, manufacture, and release into the market of its AirTags."
Apple did not respond to Ars' request to comment. Court filings show that Apple is expected to move to dismiss the lawsuit by October 27, when the company is required to respond to the amended complaint.
Could Apple do more to prevent AirTags stalking?
Both tech and domestic violence experts warned Apple ahead of the product release that AirTags could be used for unwanted stalking, but instead of making AirTags safer, the complaint alleged that Apple instead "dangerously rushed" AirTags "to market." Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a report quoted in the complaint, called AirTags "uniquely harmful" when they were first released.
"Apple automatically turned every iOS device into part of the network that AirTags use to report the location of an AirTag," Galperin said. "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.”
Galperin said that Apple's mitigation efforts when AirTags came out "were woefully insufficient,” and “the fact that they chose to bring the product to market in the state that it was" is "shameful.” But in the years since then, Galperin told Ars that she credits Apple for making improvements that made AirTags "far easier and more reliable to detect than they were when they launched."
For example, critics denounced the Android app that Apple designed to detect AirTags on non-iOS devices as flawed—requiring users to scan to detect AirTags upon suspicion of being stalked, instead of running in the background on the Android device (as tracker detectors do on iOS devices) to proactively alert users they may be being stalked. Galperin told Ars that recently Apple "started working with Google to implement" tracker detection so that it's always running "in the background," enabling an "always-on detection for AirTags in Android."
Galperin has not yet tested how well this "always-on" detection works on Android, though, and told Ars that she is cautious about taking companies "at their word about how their products work." She's also concerned that iOS 17 has a new feature where "you can actually share devices" and after pairing AirTags, link those AirTags to up to three other devices "which may belong to other people." This could make it even harder to identify stalkers, because "when you are notified that the AirTag is tracking you, it will tell you about the device or the account that it is primarily paired to, but it will not even tell you about these other devices."
"I think that is potentially very, very troublesome," Galperin told Ars.
Plaintiffs have alleged that Apple is still not doing enough to protect people from unwanted stalking with AirTags. Many plaintiffs said they had no clue what AirTags were when they first discovered hidden AirTags were being used to monitor their moves. At the very least, plaintiffs want Apple to be responsible for raising awareness of how AirTags are used by stalkers—not just to inform people who are at risk of stalking but also to ensure law enforcement is aware. Plaintiffs have alleged that Apple did not provide information to police that prevented them from accessing protective orders and pressing criminal charges. The complaint also suggested other remedies Apple could provide, like improving the consistency of AirTag alerts, which plaintiffs claimed only sometimes appeared on iPhones, so that users are always aware when an AirTag is nearby.
"Apple continues to find itself in the position of reacting to the harms its product has unleashed, as opposed to prophylactically preventing those harms," the complaint said.
A technology specialist for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Corbin Streett, is also quoted in the complaint, pointing out that Apple's threat model seemed to only consider risks of strangers using AirTags for unwanted stalking, not abusive partners. That's a problem since advocacy groups like the federally funded Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center report that the "vast majority of stalking victims are stalked by someone they know" and "intimate partner stalkers are the most likely stalkers to approach, threaten, and harm their victims."
"I hope Apple keeps their learning hat on and works to figure out that piece of the puzzle,” Streett said.