AirPods are a useful way for us to listen to podcasts or chat with friends on the phone hands-free while also saving us the hassle of unravelling pesky knots that miraculously appear on EarPod cables. And AirTags are harmless-looking little badges the size of a large coin or keyring that are designed to be a helpful way of keeping track of things like keys, wallets and luggage. But these devices that connect to our phones via Bluetooth are also increasingly being used in malicious and illegal ways by stalkers, as Glamour UK Contributing Editor Anne-Marie Tomchak reports ….
It was a Thursday morning like any other in February 2022 when 21-year-old student Natalie* woke up at 8.30 am after a night of socialising with university pals in St Andrews when she noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Natalie, who’s studying Modern History and English at the Scottish university, reached for her phone as she’d received an unusual notification.
“It was from the app Find My Phone, and it said ‘AirPod Pros detected near you. The owner can see the location of this device’. So I clicked on it, and it took me into the Find My iPhone app. There was a map of St Andrews and everywhere that I had been the night before.” explains Natalie, who was 20 years old at the time.
On the map (which GLAMOUR has seen), there were red lines showing where Natalie had walked that evening. She’d stopped off at a friend’s flat for a party before moving on to The Vic, one of the local pubs near Market Street that’s popular with students during the week. There were also 10 red dots on the map punctuating her route.
“It immediately clicked what had happened,” says Natalie, “I was being tracked. I know this because I had seen an Instagram Story from another girl in St Andrews the week before showing the exact same thing. I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I’d be ok to leave the house. So I rang my parents and went straight to the police.”
When Natalie got to the police station, she felt that they had no idea how to deal with it. “The police were no help. They just told me to turn off my Bluetooth and Location Services in my phone settings and to be extra vigilant of anyone potentially following me. I guess it’s not their fault as it’s such a new problem. But they just didn’t seem to have the technical know-how.”
For the weeks following the incident, Natalie was riddled with worry. “I was super on edge and tried not to leave the house after dark (which is really difficult at that time of year as it gets dark early). Every man I saw, I wondered, ‘Is it him? Is he following me?’ Natalie also says it was inconvenient limiting the location features on her phone as she regularly uses apps like Google Maps. “I was even scared to use my own AirPods.”
What happened to Natalie isn’t an isolated incident or an anomaly. It has happened to several other women at the University in the past year alone. It points to a wider problem of tech-related abuse where Bluetooth-enabled devices like AirPods and AirTags are being used to keep tabs on women without their knowledge or consent.
Last week Love Island star Montana Brown reported being stalked in this way. She’d just got off a flight to LA when she received a notification like Natalie’s telling her an AirTag was tracking her whereabouts. She emptied her bag in the airport toilets only to discover the Apple device.
In an interview with the BBC, Brown said she’d only realised how creepy the whole thing was after telling a few of her friends and subsequently posting about it on social media. The “sheer amount of comments and messages" I received made me realise "this is clearly something that happens quite often".
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which runs the National Stalking Helpline and is the UK’s leading personal safety charity, says the number of stalking cases involving AirPods and AirTags is on the rise. "We’ve had quite a few reports of AirTags being used to track victims, often as young as school age. And the use of AirPods to track people is also a rising trend that we’ve seen through the victims that we support,” says Tallulah Belassie-Page, a Policy and Campaigns Officer at the trust.
“From our perspective, stalking using AirTags or AirPods is a crime, and we are deeply concerned by the failure of the police to take stalking seriously. Only 5% of reports of stalking to the police in the year ending March 2022 resulted in a charge to the CPS,” adds Belassie-Page. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has submitted a super-complaint on the police response to stalking in England and Wales. It outlines a litany of ways that the system is failing victims and makes a series of recommendations to improve things.
While 95% of stalking cases never get anywhere near a courtroom, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust says that stalking is still definitely on the rise. In 2021 there were 1.5 million reported stalking cases. That figure went up to 1.8 million in 2022. But what about tech-enabled stalking specifically?
According to the CPS, there are at least a dozen stalking cases involving devices like AirTags annually. “Every month we have at least one case that involves stalking with tracking devices”, said Kate Lewis, a senior Crown Prosecution Service prosecutor, in a report published by The Times. In many instances, the cases involve an ex-partner of the victim. In one case in Bournemouth, a man popped an AirTag in the spare wheel compartment of his estranged wife’s car and tracked her for 6 months. In another, a man put a tracking device in the pushchair of his youngest child so he could keep tabs on his partner.
But these cases are really just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t give us the full picture of how prevalent stalking using AirTags is because so many cases continue to go unreported and unprosecuted. And there is still shame and stigma associated with coming forward, as St Andrews University student Natalie can attest. She says she started second-guessing herself after so little action was taken when she reported it to the authorities. “I also felt a little embarrassed after posting on social media because although other women got in touch to tell me the same thing had happened to them, nobody actually asked me about it in real life even though my story got 900 views. I guess it makes people uncomfortable.”
If you suspect you are being tracked using AirTags or AirPods, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust says there are a range of things you can do: save evidence, screenshot alerts, keep the device and seek advice before removing it as this may alert the offender, note the ID number, do not go home, report it to the police and contact the National Stalking Helpline on 0808 802 0300.
In a press statement, Apple said it condemns unwanted tracking in the strongest possible terms and has rolled out updates to improve safety.
*Natalie’s name has been changed to maintain anonymity.
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