Apple AirTag 'Weapon of Choice' for Stalkers, Says Class Action
The Apple AirTag location transmitter is “the weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers,” alleges a class action (docket 5:22-cv-07668) brought against Apple in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose Dec. 5 by Lauren Hughes of Travis County, Texas, and Jane Doe of Brooklyn, New York, who claim to be victims of AirTag stalking.
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Plaintiffs claim Apple’s acts and practices are “negligence,” “intrusion-upon-seclusion,” “product liability” and “unjust enrichment,” and they violate California’s Invasion of Privacy Act and New York General Business Law, among others.
The plaintiffs seek statutory, actual and punitive damages, plus injunctive and declaratory relief against Apple, “correcting Apple’s practice of releasing an unreasonably dangerous product into the stream of commerce, misrepresenting the harms associated therewith, and facilitating the unwanted and unconsented to location tracking of Plaintiffs and Class members.”
AirTags don’t connect to the internet themselves but use Bluetooth to emit signals to any Apple device within about 30 feet, the complaint noted. Those devices report where an AirTag was last seen, it said, acting as “crowdsourced beacons, pinging with the AirTag to locate it for the AirTag’s owner.” For an AirTag to be identified by an Apple device, it must be within 30 feet, at which time, it will have been located on Apple’s network of iPhones and iPads, the complaint said.
In 2017, 64% of Americans owned an Apple product. TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo forecast in June that 35 million AirTags would ship this year. Because of the technology and ubiquity of Apple products, “it is virtually impossible to hide from an AirTag” in most populated areas, said the complaint.
The complaint cited Eva Galperin, Electronic Frontier Foundation director-cybersecurity, saying the ubiquity of Apple products makes AirTags “uniquely harmful” because of the breadth of Apple’s network, which makes it “more powerful for tracking and more dangerous for stalking.”
Apple built in safeguards to prevent unwanted tracking, including device-based text notifications of an unknown AirTag moving with the device, but the alert “is not immediate,” said the complaint. Initially, the Apple algorithm waited 72 hours before notifying an individual of an unknown AirTag, and Apple reduced that period to “as much as a day of being tracked.” It quoted Apple, saying alerts vary depending on the iPhone’s operating system and location settings, “but users have no control over this.”
AirTags also can be used to stalk Android users, the complaint noted, but those users don’t receive an alert when they’re potentially being tracked, and they’re “more vulnerable to being tracked using an AirTag,” the complaint said. Though Apple developed an app, Tracker Detect, for Android devices, the company hasn’t taken “meaningful steps” to alert Android users of the AirTag threat. Whereas Apple users have “always-on” scanning for its devices so they’re always scanning for AirTags, Android owners have to “selectivity, and intentionally, engage Tracker Detect to conduct a scan,” the complaint said.
Plaintiff Doe found an AirTag in her child’s backpack placed by her former spouse during a contentious divorce, she said. Though she disabled it, another replaced it, she said, so she asked a friend to download Tracker Detect to confirm the presence of AirTags. Because she lived in a densely populated area, the app constantly notified her of nearby tags but couldn’t confirm or deny whether a specific one was being placed in her child’s belongings, she said.
The class is identified as the iOS stalked class, the Android stalked class, the iOS at-risk-of-stalking class, the Android at-risk-of-stalking class, the multistate sub-class and the New York sub-class. Plaintiff Hughes is the proposed class representative for the iOS stalked class. As of April, at least 150 police reports were filed describing AirTags being used to stalk victims, said the complaint. Plaintiff’s counsel believes the number is “significantly higher.”
In addition to damages, injunctive relief is necessary to “prevent further unlawful and unfair conduct by Apple” and to “restrain Apple from continuing to commit its illegal and unfair violations of privacy.” Apple didn’t comment Monday.