Happy Nice Mall

One Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend’s house in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: “AirTag Detected Near You.”

AirTag is a 1.26 inch disc with location tracking capabilities. Apple It went on sale earlier this year as a way to “track your stuff.” 24-year-old Ms. Estrada had no owner and no intimate friends. The notification on his phone said that AirTag was first seen with him four hours ago. A map showing the AirTag’s history showed the zig-zag path through the city as Ms. Estrada did her errands.

“I felt so violated,” she said. “I felt like who was watching me. What did they mean by me? It was terrible.”

Miss Estrada is not alone in her experience. In recent months people Posted on TikTok, reddit and excitement About finding AirTags on their cars and stuff. There are growing concerns that the devices may be harboring a new form of tracking that privacy groups predict could happen when Apple introduces the devices in April.

The New York Times spoke to seven women who believed they were being followed by AirTags, including a 17-year-old boy whose mother had secretly placed one in his car to keep track of his whereabouts.

Some authorities have begun to take a closer look at the threat posed by AirTags. West Seneca Police Department in New York recently warned his community Monitoring potential of devices after an AirTag is found on a car bumper. West Seneca police said Apple complied with a subpoena to learn about the AirTag in the case, which could lead to charges.

And in Canada local police department He said he was investigating the case of five thieves who placed AirTags “on high-end vehicles so they could find and steal them later.”

Researchers now believe that AirTags equipped with Bluetooth technology could introduce a more common problem of technology-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. These devices then report where an AirTag was last seen. Unlike similar monitoring products from competitors like Tile, Apple has added features to prevent abuse, such as notifications and automatic beeps that Estrada receives. (Plans to release nails a feature A spokesperson for that company said next year to prevent people from being tracked.)

But Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said AirTags pose a “uniquely harmful” threat because the ubiquity of Apple products allows for more precise tracking of people’s movements. tracking software.

“Apple has automatically made every iOS device part of the network AirTags use to report an AirTag’s location,” said Ms. Galperin. “The network Apple has access to is bigger and more powerful than the network other trackers use. It’s more powerful to track and more dangerous to track.”

Apple isn’t revealing sales figures, but the tiny $29 AirTags have proven popular, selling consistently since their release.

An Apple spokesperson, Alex Kirschner, said in a statement that the company “takes customer security very seriously” and is “committed to the privacy and security of AirTag.” He said small devices have features that notify users if they have an unknown AirTag with them, and deter bad actors from using an AirTag for malicious purposes.

“If users feel their safety is at risk, they are advised to contact local law enforcement who may work with Apple to provide available information about the unknown AirTag,” Kirschner said.

Police can ask Apple to provide information about the owner of the AirTag and potentially identify the culprit. But some people who spoke to The Times said they couldn’t find the relevant AirTags reported to them, and that police didn’t always take the notifications on their phones seriously.

Erika Torres, a graduate music student in New Orleans, reported that after a Friday night out with her boyfriend this month, an “unknown accessory” was detected by her iPhone within a two-hour period, and she had moved from a house with her. bar to your house.

He called the police and called Apple but couldn’t find an AirTag. An Apple rep told him Other devices Including AirPods can start the alert. When Ms. Torres posted a video of her experience to YouTube, a dozen people commented that it happened to them. “The number of reports suggests that there must have been some kind of glitch that caused all these people to experience this,” Ms Torres said. “I hope they’re not all being followed.”

Estrada, who received the notification while in Los Angeles, eventually found the quarter-size viewer inserted into the space behind the license plate of her 2020 Dodge Charger. HE posted a video Your ordeal on TikTok that went viral.

“Apple probably launched this product for good, but it shows that this technology can be used for good and bad,” Ms Estrada said.

Ms. Estrada said she was told by a Los Angeles police officer that her situation was not an emergency and that if she wanted to make a report, she had to bring the device to the police station in the morning. After taking a few pictures he didn’t want to wait and dispose of it.

A Los Angeles police spokesperson told The Times that the department had not heard of cases where an AirTag was used to track a person or vehicle. However, Ms. Estrada said an Apple employee who acted on her own contacted her after she posted the TikTok video. The employee managed to connect AirTag to a woman whose address was in central Los Angeles.

Another woman was informed that she was followed by an “unknown accessory” by her iPhone after leaving the gym in November. When he got home, he called the police.

Michaela Clough, a woman from Corning, California, was told that only if someone comes to her home can a report be made and that Apple’s reports are insufficient evidence that she is being followed. He then contacted an Apple customer service representative who was able to disconnect the device from Ms. Clough’s iPhone. The device was never found.

“I was so scared and disappointed that there was nothing I could do about it,” Ms Clough said, noting that she has not returned to the gym since. “I just stayed at home to spend a nice week there.”

AirTags and other products connected to Apple’s location tracking network “Find My” trigger alerts for unknown iPhones they are traveling with. The AirTag product page on Apple’s website states that devices are “designed to prevent unwanted tracking” and will play a sound when they don’t detect the device they’re paired with after a certain amount of time.

In June, after concerns about tracking were voiced, Apple posted an update Less than three days to have them start beeping within a day of being away from their AirTags-connected devices. Still, “they don’t beep very loudly,” said Mrs. Galperin.

Someone who doesn’t own an iPhone might have a hard time detecting an unwanted AirTag. AirTags are not compatible with Android smartphones. Earlier this month Apple released an Android app that can scan for AirTags – but you need to be vigilant enough to download it and use it proactively.

Apple declined to say whether it is working with Google on a technology that would allow Android phones to automatically detect their trackers.

People who said they were being followed described Apple’s security measures as inadequate. Ms. Estrada said she was notified four hours after her phone first noticed the counterfeit device. Others said it took days for them to be notified of an unknown AirTag. According to Apple, the timing of alerts may vary depending on the iPhone’s operating system and location settings.

The inconsistencies of the devices have caused confusion for people who aren’t necessarily badly watched. Mary Ford, a 17-year-old high school student from Cary, NC, received a notification that she was being followed by an unknown AirTag after she went on a date in late October. He panicked while searching for his car.

Ms. Ford understood that this was not a threat only when her mother explained that she had put the tracker in the vehicle about two weeks ago to keep track of her daughter’s whereabouts.

“I was nervous that Mary was out and I couldn’t find her,” said her mother, Wendy Ford. She said she didn’t intend to hide the AirTag information from her daughter, “but if I had known she would be notified, I probably would have told her.”

Jahna Maramba rented a car from car-sharing service Turo in Los Angeles last month, after which she and her girlfriends received a notification about an unknown AirTag nearby one Saturday night.

He drove the car to his friend’s parking lot and searched the outside of the car for an hour before the owner informed him that he had installed the device in the car. Miss Maramba had been driving for two days.

A spokesperson for Turo said in a statement that the company has no control over the technology that owners use in the vehicles they rent.

“Imagine learning through a notification that you were being watched,” Ms. Maramba said. “And you can’t do anything about it.”