Two women have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple after making the grim discovery that their former partners were using AirTags to track their locations. The suit was preceded by countless cases of women reporting that they, too, were being stalked by their exes via the $29 device, and innumerable warnings from ethical tech and women’s safety advocates.
In the new suit, one named plaintiff, Lauren Hughes, alleged that her ex-boyfriend placed an AirTag in her car tire’s wheel in an effort to learn where she’d moved to avoid him following their breakup. Her ex, she alleged, made efforts to disguise it by coloring it with a sharpie marker and tying it in a plastic bag. He soon began using the device to taunt her—even going so far as to post a photo of a taco truck from her new neighborhood and posting it online alongside a winking emoji and the hashtag “#airt2.0.”
As I previously reported, justice is exceptionally difficult to come by for anyone alleging AirTag stalking. As many experts told me, neither the police or Big Tech are particularly adept at navigating the many nuances of keeping people safe in abusive situations. “The issue itself is not just about AirTags,” Erica Olsen, director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV)’s Safety Net project, told Jezebel. “Tracking as a tactic of abuse is much broader than AirTags and has been a consistent issue within the domestic violence and stalking world for a long time.”
The new lawsuit alleges that any of Apple’s supposed safeguards for the device have done little to protect people like the plaintiffs. “While Apple has built safeguards into the AirTag product, they are woefully inadequate, and do little, if anything, to promptly warn individuals if they are being tracked.”
Source: Two Women Sue Apple After Their Exes Used AirTags to Stalk Them