New York.- Privacy groups sounded the alarm about coin-sized location-tracking devices when they were introduced. Now, people are worried that those fears will come true.
On a Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend’s house in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: “An AirTag was detected near you.”
An AirTag is a 1.26-inch drive with location-tracking capabilities that Apple began selling earlier this year as a way to “track your stuff.”
Estrada, 24, doesn’t have one and neither do the friends she was with. Her phone notification told her that an AirTag had been detected four hours earlier.
An AirTag history map showed a switchback path that Estrada had driven through the city while doing a few things.
“I felt violated,” she said. “I wondered who is following me? What were her intentions? I felt scared.”
Estrada is not the only one who has had that experience. In recent months, people have posted on TikTok, Reddit and Twitter about her finding AirTags in their cars and her belongings.
There is growing concern that these devices could enable a new form of stalking, which privacy groups predicted could happen when Apple introduced the devices in April.
The New York Times spoke to seven women who believe they were tracked with AirTags, including a 17-year-old whose mother surreptitiously placed one in her car to find out where she was.
Some authorities have begun to take a close look at the threat posed by AirTags. The West Seneca Police Department in New York recently warned its community about the devices’ tracking potential after an AirTag was found on a car bumper.
Apple complied with a subpoena to provide information about the AirTag, which could lead to charges, West Seneca police said.
Researchers believe that AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could reveal a broader problem with tracking technology.
The devices emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system.
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