{"id":37834,"date":"2022-12-06T16:31:14","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T21:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=37834"},"modified":"2022-12-06T16:34:24","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T21:34:24","slug":"airtag-stalking-class-action-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/airtag-stalking-class-action-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"AirTag Stalking Class Action Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2022\/12\/apple-airtags-are-now-the-weapon-of-choice-for-stalkers-lawsuit-says\/\">Ashley Belanger<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=33880898\">Hacker News<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macrumors.com\/2022\/12\/06\/women-sue-apple-over-airtags\/\">MacRumors<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2022\/12\/apple-airtags-are-now-the-weapon-of-choice-for-stalkers-lawsuit-says\/\"><p>Confronted by police reports and concerns from privacy advocates, Apple released updates <a href=\"https:\/\/www.apple.com\/newsroom\/2022\/02\/an-update-on-airtag-and-unwanted-tracking\/\">in February<\/a>, claiming that new features would mitigate reported stalking risks. Stalking reports kept coming, though, and it increasingly seemed to victims that Apple had not done enough to adequately secure AirTags. Now, Apple is being sued by two women who claim that the company is still marketing a &ldquo;dangerous&rdquo; product.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>Plaintiffs suing represent various stalked classes. They are asking for a jury to assess whether, in addition to injunctive relief and damages, Apple should owe punitive damages for allegedly releasing a defective product with insufficient safeguards to prevent stalking, then profiting off sales after allegedly misleading the public to believe AirTags were &ldquo;stalker-proof.&rdquo;<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>One of the earliest solutions from Apple was providing text-based notifications for iOS users, alerting them when there was an &ldquo;AirTag Found Moving With You.&rdquo; However, users couldn&rsquo;t always trust this alert was accurate&mdash;or referring to an AirTag device located near them in a crowd&mdash;and they couldn&rsquo;t always find the tracking device, even if they knew it existed. For Android users, the situation was even bleaker because Apple had no way to send automatic alerts. Android users, thus, became &ldquo;nearly defenseless to tracking\/stalking using an AirTag,&rdquo; because the only way to find out was to proactively download an app called Tracker Detect and manually search for AirTags.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>It doesn&rsquo;t seem to me that the product is defective or that there&rsquo;s something Apple should be doing but isn&rsquo;t. There&rsquo;s no way to fully prevent malicious uses, and they already made AirTag less useful in trying to reduce them.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/10\/airtag-updates-to-address-unwanted-tracking\/\">AirTag Updates to Address Unwanted Tracking<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/13\/tracker-detect-android-app-for-airtag\/\">Tracker Detect Android App for AirTag<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ashley Belanger (Hacker News, MacRumors): Confronted by police reports and concerns from privacy advocates, Apple released updates in February, claiming that new features would mitigate reported stalking risks. Stalking reports kept coming, though, and it increasingly seemed to victims that Apple had not done enough to adequately secure AirTags. Now, Apple is being sued by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2022-12-06T21:31:16Z","apple_news_api_id":"f7d683bc-df06-4225-a36b-6cd8cd9ae7c0","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-12-06T21:34:27Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A99aDvN8GQiWja2zYzZrnwA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2056,248,31,2078,41,209,355],"class_list":["post-37834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-airtag","tag-android","tag-ios","tag-ios-15","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal","tag-privacy"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37834"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37839,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37834\/revisions\/37839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}