Highlights:
- Apple launched AirTag in April 2021 to help keep track of your belongings
- Several reports of Apple AirTag being misused have come to light
- Apple issues an official statement
Several more reports of Apple AirTag being misused have come to light in the last couple of weeks and the latest report went viral where a woman found that an Apple AirTag was placed inside her bag to track her moves and location without her knowing.
When launched, Apple said that AirTag would help people find their lost objects while also allowing them to track their belongings such as keys, cards and other loose items which are easy to misplace.
However, in the recent times, reports have surfaced where AirTags has become a tool for wrongful practices which include an incident where a woman killed her boyfriend after she reportedly tracked him down using AirTag placed on his iPhone.
The incident from this week comes from a woman who lives in Los Angeles, America and did not notice that the AirTag was put on her until the tracker alert was raised by her iPhone. She said, “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,” in a threat of tweets.
An apple AirTag was put on me to track my location Saturday night. I’m sharing what happened to me so you know what to look for as I had never heard of this prior to Saturday night.
— Hannah Rose May (@Hannahrosemay_) June 28, 2022
The US-based tech giant said that it has been investigating incidents like these and is even looking for ways to make the AirTag safer for its users, however, given the AirTag’s overall size and use case has become a cause for concern.
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Apple mentioned that in its efforts to minimise such incidents includes working closely with the law enforcement agencies, and it had even shared a statement regarding this back in February this year.
In a post, Apple said, “We have been actively working with law enforcement on all AirTag-related requests we’ve received.
“Based on our knowledge and on discussions with law enforcement, incidents of AirTag misuse are rare; however, each instance is one too many”.
Plans at Apple’s headquarters have been laid down to make AirTag safer which will include features like precision finding, display alert with sound, refining unwanted tracking alert logic and tuning the AirTags sound so that people can easily hear the alert.
Apple said that these changes are yet to be offered, and going by these series of events related to AirTag, it is high time that Apple rolls out the safety features at the earliest.
