Apple has responded to an issue wherein a woman claimed an AirTags was tracking her. According to The Independent, Irish actor and writer Hannah Rose May claimed that an Apple Device was tracking her during an after hours event.
May claimed she was attending an event at Disneyland after hours. The event went until 2 a.m. May stated, “I got a ‘Find My’ notification at the end of the night that I didn’t think anything of but opened it anyway and it turned out to be this… someone had been tracking me for two hours.”
May also shared her experienced via Twitter, providing a screenshot of an alert stating that an AirTag belonging to someone else was tracking her.
Prior to driving home, May was able to disable tracking on the device. May also stated that she was with a group of people for the duration of the time the device was tracking her.
After sharing her story on Instagram, May stated that she received several direct messages from individuals who’ve had similar experiences.
On Twitter, her story has seen over 15,000 retweets, leading May to share the following advice:
If you ever get a ‘Find My’ notification make sure you open the app immediately as the safety alert doesn’t appear on the screen you have to open the app. Non iPhone users, Apple created an app for androids for this very reason called Tracker Detect.
Apple has offered the following statement regarding the issue:
AirTag was designed to help people locate their personal belongings, not to track people or another person’s property, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products.
Unwanted tracking has long been a societal problem, and we took this concern seriously in the design of AirTag. It’s why the Find My network is built with privacy in mind, uses end-to-end encryption, and why we innovated with the first-ever proactive system to alert you of unwanted tracking. We hope this starts an industry trend for others to also provide these sorts of proactive warnings in their products.
The spokesperson also added that Apple has been working with law enforcement concerning all AirTag-related requests, and also stated that AirTag incidents are rare. The spokesperson also stated that there will be improvements to the AirTag tracking device by the end of 2022. Recent features and updates have included recision finding, a display alert with sound, refining unwanted tracking alert logic and adjusting the tone sequence to use louder tones to make an unknown AirTag more easy to find.
While AirTags may continue to have problems, the state of Ohio is working on policy that would make them illegal.
Apple has been working on protecting users. With iOS 16, Safety Check allows users who are at risk of domestic or intimate partner violence to remove access they have given to others. It also gives users an emergency reset option. This helps users sign out of their iCloud on all of their devices, reset privacy permissions and limit messaging to just the device in their hand.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.