Apple sued by two women over AirTag stalking | Hacker News Reader

Apple sued by two women over AirTag stalking

phonearena.com

76 pointsmikece97 comments

It was the people placing the tags that knowingly was breaking the law. There have been devices available for years that makes it easy to track somebody, they're only suing Apple because Apple have a lot of money so the potential payout is big. This is like suing the phone company because your creepy ex calls and threatens you.

That Apple's system uses the huge existing network of "every iphone" does reduce the barrier to entry quite a lot. It's cheaper, doesn't require as much technical knowledge, placement considerations for GPS antennas, power source for hungrier devices, etc.

And Apple did tout the features intended to discourage it being used this way.

> That Apple's system uses the huge existing network of "every iphone" does reduce the barrier to entry quite a lot.

I bought a handful of Tiles to track my ATV/snowmobile that I leave out of state. Even when they're in my driveway, well within my Wi-Fi range they do not work. I'm going to ditch them for AirTags.

Tiles need Bluetooth to work, not Wi-Fi.

Wow. I feel like an idiot. Despite mentioning "GPS" several times in their copy, it does seem that Bluetooth is the only way to "find" a device. I still don't understand how the "GPS" part of their trackers work. Anyone have details?

I'm going to remove them and attach to "household" items instead.

The GPS part is just the tiles talking to any tile-enabled phone. The GPS is only in the phones, like:

Any tile-enabled phone -> sees a tile -> sends a packet to the Tile mothership with the tile UUID + phone location.

(Plus perhaps some nuances like guessing a more specific location for the tag based on bluetooth radio data)

Tile and Airtags works the same way. They broadcast a unique serial number over BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), and phones and other devices nearby detects those. The phone sends this serial number together with its location to a server, which then tells the registered owner of the tag where it is.

To find it locally the simpler ones just use received signal strength over Bluetooth, Airtags and iPhones have a more sophisticated system with a higher frequency radio with better localization, I don't remember the details.

It's this first system where other devices take part in a huge sensor network that makes Airtags so powerful, there a lot of iOS devices out there and crucially they all run this code in the background. Tiles will never work as well, because you won't get the same number of people willingly running their app all the time. It's a network effect more than a technical problem.

Hi, I'm the CEO of Life360 and we recently bought Tile. We run on 13% of all iPhones in the US, and have Android coverage, and we are turning on our network to scan for Tile devices. We will have much closer parity to iOS very soon - in fact it is already happening.

We do not use wifi - as to other commenters it is bluetooth only, but we have some other big plans in the works.

Thanks for chiming in. Looks like it was my mistake in interpreting your product features. I'm going to attach them to household items but I'm still perplexed why each of my Tiles hasn't been "seen" in over a year yet I've ridden my ATV/snowmobile a handful of times during that period, all while having my phone in my pocket. Does the iOS app need to be open?

No, it doesn't need to be open. If you send me a note at chris at life360.com I'll investigate why it isn't working. I'm curious myself and we only recently completed our acquisition of the company.

AirTags or other “tracking devices” are not illegal. We don’t sue gun companies for selling legal weapons which are then used to illegally murder someone, do we? Do we sue knife companies when someone stabs someone using one of their knives?

AirTags, like knives, are a useful tool that can also be used for purposes which are either illegal or borderline illegal. But we have so many tools which are like that, are we going to sue every company that sells something that could be used nefariously?

Presumably the case would focus on marketing claims of protection against this kind of use versus reality, or basic due diligence, etc. A gun company that claimed specific protective features that didn't work, or missed some obvious base safety features would probably get sued, yes.

I don't know enough about the product to know if any of that has any merit, but I assume that's what the plaintiffs will try to prove.

There are many cases, such as: https://www.wmur.com/article/lawsuit-new-hampshire-sig-sauer...

In this cause the suit is that the gun is defective, it can fire without a trigger pull.

The Apple suit is claiming negligence on the part of Apple because they did NOT do something "simple" to prevent tracking. It'll likely come down to whether that "simple" thing actually was, whether it was known, etc, etc.

How a product is marketed can also come into play, which is why Apple has been very careful (just like gun manufacturers) to never say or imply that it could be used for crimes.

>Apple has been very careful (just like gun manufacturers) to never say or imply that it could be used for crimes

They have talked about it:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/an-update-on-airtag-a...

Even on the main product page (https://www.apple.com/airtag/) ..."AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking".

That's talking how it can't (or shouldn't) be used for crimes, but it starts to get a little close to Mr Incredible telling the old lady what not to do at some point, and that can be the point the lawyers aim at.

> We don’t sue gun companies for selling legal weapons which are then used to illegally murder someone, do we?

People do all the time[0]. Do they win? Not sure.

0. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/29/uvalde-shooting-laws...

I love how you're putting guns and knives into the same category here. They're actually a nice example for how a difference in quantity (deadliness) becomes a difference in quality. Which is why anyone can buy a knife pretty much anywhere in the world, while most of the "civilized" world puts heavy (heavy) constraints on who gets to carry fire arms. But I'm sure the countries that neither control who gets one nor require much training before they get it are doing juuuust fine. /s

> Which is why anyone can buy a knife pretty much anywhere in the world

Not quite true. I went to AUS a couple of years ago with a pocket knife, at one point I took it out to cut something and someone mentioned to me that a knife like that was illegal in AUS so I had to keep it hidden in the hotel the rest of the trip.

In the UK, you can buy a knife like that, but you it might be illegal to carry it around in your pocket.

Some places ban knives based on the opening mechanism. E.g. from what I can tell the UK bans spring-assisted opening knives (switchblades in colloquial terms).

The government web site: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

"It’s also illegal to: carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’"

"A court will decide if you’ve got a good reason to carry a knife or a weapon if you’re charged with carrying it illegally."

Honest question: Is "because sometimes I need to cut something" a "good reason." I routinely carry a small pocket knife with a 3" blade that folds up, and I use it very frequently. Would this be allowed in the UK?

Also from the site, one of the requirements is "are not lock knives (they do not have a button, spring or catch that you have to use to fold the knife)"

My pocket knife folds open and then catches, meaning I have to push a little metal tab out of the way to fold it back closed. This seems safer to me, since otherwise the blade might fold up on my fingers while I'm trying to use it. Would this be illegal in the UK?

I got one like that on my keychain too and while the personal at the airport measured the blade size, it was fine to take along for an international flight within the EU. I'm neither from the UK nor a lawyer through, and airport personal aren't the police, still hard to imagine that they'd ignore that if it was illegal.

> Would this be illegal in the UK?

I think those are legal, I think you've got it reversed. Knives that lack some kind of mechanism that locks the blade open are illegal (e.g. a butterfly knife).

Thinking about it, I think that section is to specifically ban butterfly knives. That's the only style of non-fixed blade knife I can think of that doesn't have a compliant locking mechanism.

That reasoning would make sense but the most server limits on firearms are mostly applied to the least commonly used weapons for murders. For instance more than twice the number of people get murdered by knives in the US than rifles (rather broad category). Unless you're talking about quantity of deadly use vs non deadly use

Regardless i think it doesn't make sense to have a legal gray zone where it's legal but you can still be sued about it. Either make it illegal or certain behaviors illegal and sue for that but arbitrary lawsuits are not the answer

> https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...

> For instance more than twice the number of people get murdered by knives in the US than rifles (rather broad category)

That's just cherry picking data. You're comparing the broadest possible category "knives" with a subset of another category -- rifles are a subset of knives.

You might note that certain categories of knives are regulated, and actually illegal in many states. Not all knives are the same. This is obvious. But your point ignores it.

> That reasoning would make sense but the most server limits on firearms are mostly applied to the least commonly used weapons for murders.

Well, yeah, if you consider the limits on rifles to be severe, why would you be surprised that they're used less for murder? If anything, that sounds like an argument that limits work and we should be limiting _more_ things

> Which is why anyone can buy a knife pretty much anywhere in the world

Actually in the UK, you are not allowed to sell a knife of any kind to someone under 18 years of age (though Scotland allows 16 and 17 year olds to buy cutlery).

https://www.police.uk/pu/advice-crime-prevention/possession-...

This is because their is a federal law that says gun companies aren't liable. Prior to the passing of this law, the NRA argued that without it, gun companies would all go out of business because they'd be sued into oblivion.

The families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook have sued gun companies and succeeded (at least to some degree, they settled) through a workaround of the federal law. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/nyregion/sandy-hook-famil...

The argument here is that Apple's design of IOS was negligent as it failed to protect from stalking.

> We don’t sue gun companies for selling legal weapons which are then used to illegally murder someone, do we? Do we sue knife companies when someone stabs someone using one of their knives?

_You_, don't sue gun companies. Don't project. Plenty of other people do and get money from it.

any civilian could even leverage someone's own Apple device to track them

> This is like suing the phone company because your creepy ex calls and threatens you.

I was going to try and come up with some witty way to claim that your phone company could enable direct physical violence against you, but that feels disingenuous.

We have a responsibility, as humans, to not enable bad actors -- and the Airtag lies somewhere between a phone company and an obviously illegally sold remote access trojan. I think Apple's fucked up because they've been told repeatedly that they're making it trivially easy for people to commit crimes against others, whether it be vehicle theft or stalking, and their solution is just to add a very easily defeatable speaker.

I want a lot more from one of the most powerful corporations in the world.

People on hackernews, for self-evident reasons, tend to not be receptive to the argument that some technologies shouldn't be made.

They have anti-stalking features (little notifications that say "The owner of this Airtag can see your location."). You can also trigger the airtag to play a sound if it's in your vicinity I believe.

Ultimately, any device with location services will eventually be used this way. Even if it's cost-prohibitive now, you can definitely buy 5-year-old smartphones for the same purpose. This feels like something that you can't expect Apple to solve more than they already have, and needs to be handled by law enforcement.

I think we're disagreeing that if a organization makes bad behavior notably easier (a cheap Airtag with a long battery life that's implementable by the vast majority of people, versus an old cellphone), they bear proportionate responsibility for the bad behavior.

It's not acceptable to me to significantly enable evil and just say that someone else (LEO) can handle it. In this case, that means figuring out stronger controls before releasing a product.

I'm not disagreeing that apple has some responsibility here. I'm saying they've pretty much done all they can without the cooperation of external forces.

Some things they could do are:

1. Make sure android phones also detect Airtags out of the box by coming up with some universal standard. This is not entirely in their hands.

2. Collaborate with LE to try to detect and warn of stalking behavior.

They could feasibly try to do #2 and brick devices that are likely to be involved in stalking, but I'm not sure if this is technically feasible (too high of a false positive rate would obviously cause issues, and it's not a lot of data to go off of).

Question, do you believe gun makers should be sued by victims of shootings?

Do you believe beer makers should be sued by victims of drunk driving crashes?

Just trying to see where we draw the line to be honest.

You draw the line at personal responsibility.

The gun maker didn’t pull the trigger and the beer maker didn’t pour it into your mouth and hand you the keys to your own car, and Apple didn’t attach these AirTags to these two women: but someone did, and that’s who is responsible.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand. They are of course suing because $$$$.

I know, but that isn’t the question I was addressing.

I think there are cases where manufacturers blatantly disregard opportunities for misuse that should fall upon them (Tesla's FSD releases with Elon's "wink wink don't take your hands off the wheel" come to mind). I just don't think this is one of them.

I would still hold the driver responsible in that case. The driver is licensed, they received the warnings, and it explicitly isn’t FSD (if you correct me and tell me that they’ve re-marketed the existing driver assist feature set as FSD I’ll probably believe you, just give me a link, but as far as I know they haven’t crossed that threshold).

https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-subscription... is literally what it's called. The page is very careful to say that Full Self-Driving is not a substitute for attentive driving, but.. why else would you call it that?

TIL.

Turning it into a marketing name instead of a marketing spin probably explains how they got away with that preorder nonsense too. I’ll still say the licensed driver in the seat is responsible, but if someone wanted to ream Tesla in court over this, I wouldn’t be opposed.

Also early on Elon Musk would frequently tweet people doing stupid illegal things in their Teslas (e.g. fooling the sensors, jumping into the backseat from the drivers seat and pretending they’re in a taxi) and then say “obviously you shouldn’t do this but isn’t it cool that you can!”

He’d also make misleading claims about “FSD” being safer than human drivers (it isn’t, but FSD gets disabled in tricky situations, so he could lie with statistics).

I agree that the only person who should be prosecuted criminally in these cases is the one who committed the felonies, but the question is about whether people should have civil liability. Those are two very different legal standards, and the bar for civil liability is a lot lower. It doesn't really seem like people are discussing this aspect at all in this thread (not just you, but this seemed like a relevant place to bring up the point). I don't feel like I have a strong enough grasp of the legal issues at hand to have a strong opinion about whether there should be civil liability in these cases, but I'm not at all convinced that "someone else is more responsible" is a good counterargument, since there's no reason that multiple parties could be liable.

You need the case specifics to usefully argue for or against civil liability. The standard of proof might be lower but that must makes it more messy. Apple’s taken some measures to prevent themselves from being liable. Were they enough? Is it possible to sell this kind of product and do enough to insulate themselves without getting some laws changed? Who knows. Maybe this Court will weigh in on that, assuming Apple doesn’t settle to make this go away. There’s a ceiling on the useful discussion we can have about civil liability in an HN thread about an ongoing case about this specific product.

The same is true with guns and beers: you need facts of the case that are being argued, not just a couple of off-the-cuff whatabouts.

That seems pretty reasonable. It doesn't make it less strange that people are so confidently asserting that there's no possible reasonable basis for a lawsuit though.

Mentioned in another comment, but I suspect the lawsuit will focus on either negligence in product safety features, or marketing claims about protection against this type of use not working as claimed.

I guess following your analogies, maybe a "fingerprint lock gun" that unlocks with anyone's fingerprint, despite claims that it doesn't. Or beer marketed as 4% alcohol content that actually is 8%.

And, again, not saying that's the case here. But I suspect that's what the plaintiff would attempt to prove, some negligence of due diligence or false claims.

No I don't, unless they specifically marketed their products to those perpetrators. A drive in bar would encourage drunk driving, selling beer to the general population puts the decision of driving drunk in the hands of the consumer.

I'm not American, we have completely different gun laws and gun culture here, so it's difficult for me to relate. We had one school killing a few years ago where the attacker used a sword, I don't think the sword manufacturer was ever blamed for that in any way.

I completely agree. I just posted that comment because it seems like there's this weird idea that certain companies get passes on responsibility vs others. Wanted to see what people thought about these use cases and different categories.

Welcome to the US. You shoot somebody and they sue the gun maker, you stab somebody and they sue the knife maker, you run somebody over and they sue the car maker.

You can't civilly sue the gun maker for the actions of their users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_...

Anymore. You only need a law because it was happening.

This is hyperbole. You typically can't sue (and win) against the maker of an item used in a crime just because they manufactured it.

There is usually some extenuating circumstance when these cases do prevail. For instance one manufacturer was found to have such incendiary marketing around their assault rifle it had risen to the level of a "call to arms". So typically it has to be more than "We are the manufacturer"

> For instance one manufacturer was found to have such incendiary marketing around their assault rifle it had risen to the level of a "call to arms".

Which case? Corporations have free speech rights. They have artistic license to advertise their product as they see fit. I don't see how that's a "call to arms" anymore than military movies are.

I think the payout is the main point here.

Apple has deep pockets and good lawyers. High reward, low probability.

A judge may decide whether malice or stupidity led to the release of such commoditized trackers.

I feel like it’s legitimate.

The article doesn't link to or mention the case number; from Reuters[1]: (which might be a better URL for this item anyway?)

> The case is Hughes et al v. Apple Inc, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 22-07668.

Link to the case filing: https://unicourt.com/case/pc-db5-hughes-et-al-v-apple-inc-13...

1: https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-is-sued-by-women-who-say...

Helpful, though it's a link to only some very superficial info on the case. Downloading the documents from there is only free for "crowdsourced" documents.

I imagine someone will download from PACER and publish it publicly sometime later today though.

Part of me says "kitchen knife manufacturer sued over stabbing" and the other part of me says the fact that these tags can be rigged to avoid sweeps is screwy. The linked story says the tags just have a hole drilled into the tiny speaker so it doesn't beep. Just making it ping and not showing it on the phone itself seems like a dumb way to make "sweeps" work with these tags.

The solution obviously is to coat the speaker in diamond.

Gun manufacturers have been sued over school shootings, so this isn't that much out of the ordinary.

Because of how they advertised and I don't know if anyone has actually won those argument.

The iPhone app does have a pretty accurate Tag-finding feature. So disabling the speaker doesn't preclude a victim being notified of tracking and finding the device.

But, that's on Apple. There's only a very limited [official Apple] app available on Android - it lacks automatic notification of being tracked - victim has to manually scan for Tags. I don't know how well it can precisely locate the Tags.

EDIT - added "official Apple" in brackets above.

> There's only a very limited app available on Android…

Android users have a bunch of AirTag scanning options: https://mashtips.com/android-airtag-finder-apps/

No they don't. Besides the obvious flaw of having to download and open an app to check if you're being tracked, they just don't work. They all have sub 2.5 ratings on the app store.

The only ones on that list that don't have terrible ratings are general bluetooth scanners and they don't tell you that you're being tracked, just that there's one nearby. Compare that to iPhones where you'll get a notification if one is following your movement, they're functionally useless if you don't think you're being tracked.

It seems like this use case would be pretty easy to detect and disable.

There should be a way to give a fuzzy location to give you a general idea of which geo-fence you left something. Only authorized via warrant LE should be always able see exact location. You should only be able to get exact location for 20ft geofences that you have ever been in.The point of these is to find stuff you lost, not confront thieves (leave that to LE). Then you can still find tags you misplaced at your school or house or work or.... but you can't find it at a place you have never been. If your kid went somewhere new, you just have to go there and then you'd be able to see the location too.

Knives are much more useful than a $$ piece of future e waste that helps you find your lost keys once in a blue moon

As someone who loses his keys a lot, air tags are a lifesaver.

Also they're actually designed to last a long time being simple devices, with water proofing and battery replacability. I foresee using them until they break at this rate, which will probably be many, many years.

Knifes break, rust, dent and lose their sharpness. Many are about the equivalent of ewaste, much like furniture itself.

There are no electronics in knives so I don't see how they could be e waste

I'm still using knives my grandparents used, still as sharp as ever and not rusty at all

As for losing your keys there are many systems that rely on the brain or other low tech mechanism to avoid losing them

AirTags are literally the only tracking device that has any kind of anti-stalking feature at all. This lawsuit, and the attention Apple is getting, is absurd.

The anti-stalking feature is actually pretty annoying. We ordered a few, and then quickly learned you can't share their location with family members, etc. So all of them got registered to my spouse's phone, and I started getting stalker warnings for taking her car with her keys, or driving our family to the next state to visit family, with a kids laptop bag in the car, etc.

Having family sharing actually work would have 'fixed' one of the two cases in the article:

>According to the other woman in the case, her husband placed an AirTag in her child's backpack to track her.

I don't really think this is on Apple, but I find it funny that you need to pay Apple (by buying an iPhone) in order to get their anti-stalking features. My grandfather, who never used a smart phone, would have no way of knowing an AirTag was being used against him.

My great-great-grandfather too.

This is pretty false information.

Along with an Android app being available for direct scanning. The airtag itself will beep if it's been away from its linked device for an unusual amount of time.

It's also the only tracking device that when turned into police can be used to obtain information on the person observing the location (i.e. the stalker).

I think the android app has to manually search for nearby tags, while iPhone will proactively surface notifications that they're being followed, something the Android app does not do. So you'd have to at least suspect that you're being stalked with Android.

If you have an iPhone it will tell you if an unknown AirTag is near you. Apple provides a free app for Android phones that will let you see if any AirTags are nearby. You don’t have to buy anything

Except for a smart phone?

So the question is, if those were not airtags but Google Pixel phones, would they sue Google for it?

I mean... you can do pretty much the same with Google Pixel and more. You can buy used ones for cheaper than an AirTag. And it does not require any special knowledge either.

About the only thing is that it is easier to conceal an AirTag and it will run for much longer, but there is no shortage of places on a car where you can be sure your wife will never look and many times you don't need for it to stay active for weeks or you have ability to charge it regularly making it only a bit of nuisance.

> you can do pretty much the same with Google Pixel and more.

Can you? According to apple website, “AirTag is designed to keep going more than a year on a standard battery you can easily replace”. Pixel probably wouldn’t last even a week.

[1] https://www.apple.com/airtag/

As I mentioned, that might not be a problem at all. If you can put it there once, you can probably take it out every week or two, charge it and replace it. Or replace the powerbank it is hooked up to.

Not all surveillance needs to be constant and long term. If you are curious what your wife does during lunchtime or what is your coworkers address it might be enough to get it running for couple of hours.

Or, instead of all of that, you could just pick up a $30 AirTag off the shelf at Target.

Apple could mitigate this risk to some extent. If some tracker that is not mine remains in proximity to me while I move around (or my iDevice does), it should warn me and then help me to find and identify/eliminate that tracker. If that tracker belongs to a member of my family or immediate circle, I could mark that tracker as accepted and not a risk. It would also be good to know who that tracker belongs to so I could be aware of the risk coming from that person.

That set of features literally already exists. An iDevice will very aggressively warn your about trackers that don’t belong to you following you around. But of course only on iDevices. Though there’s no way to share an AirTag with someone else. (That might open up the risk that a stalker could “share” an AirTag with their victim in a way they’re not aware of for the purpose of silencing those alerts)

Someone is trying to make money fast. AirTags are a tool, the ones being sued are the ones who were using them to break the law.

Also, Apple does have features to prevent stalking.

Does android warn if you're being tracked by a AirTag?

There are apps for Android that monitor and alert for nearby AirTags.

There's an official one by Apple, Tracker Detect [1], but I've heard that some third-party apps perform better [2].

I have no personal experience with any of them.

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

2. https://mashtips.com/android-airtag-finder-apps/

Not natively. You need to install a specific app, for example:

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

- https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard

Apple provides an Android app to check for AirTags nearby

Remember that in the US you can sue anybody for anything at any time. Doesn't mean you'll get anywhere in the courts.

I'd kind of like to sue Apple for neutering my AirTags so that they are no longer a good way to recover stolen items.

They've never been advertised as such, it's never been about stollen items

And even if they work, the police are unlikely to care, and it's not worth trying to recover the device yourself.

Sigh, AirTags could be super useful. We can never have nice things.

In an ideal world this would make Apple, Samsung, Google and the others start using a common system where you could find out if a tag is following you regardless of your phone's OS. I guess a big part of the problem, if there is a technical problem, is that these tags are siloed in separate systems. How many Android users are going to download and run an Apple app to get notified if there's an Airtag following them? What about Tiles, Samsung tags, whatever is sold on AliExpress, etc?

If course the real issue is that people will always do bad things to others. These abusive exes could have followed these women in rented cars, would we really blame Hertz in that case?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com