Person reports dodgy use of an Apple AirTag secretly placed on her car

The Apple AirTag trackers have proven themselves a controversial topic since the day of their release in April this year. By now, there have been both positive reports of users finding their lost items after having them stolen or lost and negative ones pointing at malicious intent such as stalking.

Today’s case is exactly that. Although it has not been proven yet, the story of Twitter user Jeana Jeana paints a picture that would be hard to mistake for anything other than invading and frightening. (via 9to5Mac)

Jeana found an Apple AirTag under the front passenger wheel well of her car, presumably placed there while she was inside a bar. On her way home, she started getting the “AirTag Found Moving With You” push notification on her iPhone.

At first, Jeana wasn’t sure whether there was a real reason for the notification to pop up. However, it was late, and there was no traffic at all to confuse her iPhone with a false signal from another closeby AirTag. So, she finally confirmed to herself that something was not right.

After searching for the AirTag and failing to find it, though, she decided to sleep it over in a location that was not her home. The next morning, a friend of hers found the tracker and threw it away. Unfortunately, while that was probably the most instinctive course of action, keeping it would have allowed the possibility of tracking the tag’s owner. That’s because Apple, while not being able to track live location updates, does store records of them in case of any abuse with an AirTag.

In other words, if the tracker wasn’t thrown away, Jeana would have been able to contact the police and request a police investigation. At that point, Apple could have very well agreed to access the information related to that specific AirTag and find the Apple ID that is connected to it.