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CYBER

Apple AirTags Are Being Used for Stalking

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4645 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.


Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn’t own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives—ex-partners, husbands, bosses—who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners—the most likely people to harm women overall—are using AirTags to stalk and harass them.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Tann, it's got the code it's going to launch.

0:11.0

It's a unit system. I know this.

0:16.0

It's all the files of the whole park. It tells her everything.

0:20.0

Sir, he's uploading the virus.

0:22.4

Eagle One, the package is being delivered.

0:27.6

Hello, Cyber. This is Motherboard Editor-in-Chief, Jason Kebler. I am filling in for Matthew

0:32.9

Galt, who is taking a much-deserved break and much-deserved vacation.

0:43.2

I've noticed that on Matt's last few podcast recordings, he's had like a whole script,

0:47.7

and he's done like a very professional read and intro, and I've been very impressed by that.

0:50.4

I do not have those skills, so you're stuck with me.

0:56.4

It's the B team, although our guest is an A-, a member of the A team. We have Sam Cole,

1:03.1

a senior editor for motherboard. Sam, hello. What's up? Hey, hey, not much. How are you? I'm good.

1:07.3

How did you like that? That was a good intro, right? That was great. That was A plus. That was great, but no one knows what we're talking about. Yeah. So we are going to be talking about your most recent story called police records show

1:16.4

women are being stocked with Apple air tags across the country.

1:20.8

This was, in my opinion, one of the best stories that we've run over the last six months

1:25.7

or so just in terms of its importance,

1:27.9

the fact that we haven't really had as much reporting on this across the industry as you'd

1:33.8

like to see considering how bad the problem is. And yeah, can you just tell me, first of all,

1:40.7

like what are air tags and what have security professionals been warning about

1:45.5

forever since they've been introduced? Yeah, so air tags are these little devices that are about

1:52.5

like the size of a coin. They have inside of them a speaker, a Bluetooth receiver, and a battery.

2:04.3

And they use the Bluetooth signals from other Apple devices that are nearby to detect where that little coin is on a map.

...

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