Apple is being sued by more than 30 people who say AirTags were used to track and harass them, and the company is facing the kind of legal headache that tends to follow a product once its safety features start looking like marketing, not protection. The claims have been split into separate cases after an earlier attempt at a collective lawsuit failed to get certified.
The lawsuits all argue the same basic point: Apple knew AirTags could be abused by ”dangerous individuals” for stalking, coercion, and control, yet still shipped them without adequate safeguards. Apple has previously acknowledged that it should have consulted domestic violence organizations before launch, which is a fairly blunt admission for a company that likes to present privacy as a religion.
Why AirTag stalking complaints keep piling up
AirTag is not the only tracker on the market, but it is the one tied to Apple’s Find My network, which gives it huge reach through nearby compatible devices. That reach is exactly what makes it useful for finding lost keys – and exactly what makes it useful for someone trying to follow another person without being noticed.
Apple has added cross-platform alerts and detection tools, but the plaintiffs say those defenses arrive too slowly. They point to a warning delay of four to eight hours, and say the original version of the system could take 72 hours before notifying a potential victim. That is an eternity in a stalking case.
What the plaintiffs say Apple already knew
According to the filings, internal Apple material from the original litigation showed the company understood its safeguards would ”deter, not prevent” malicious use. The plaintiffs also say Apple received more than 40,000 complaints about stalking between April 2021 and April 2024, which undercuts any suggestion that the problem is a one-off abuse case.
There is another ugly detail: the AirTag’s speaker can be removed, and modified silent versions are reportedly sold online. So much for the comforting little beep. The lawsuits also reference public reports of stalking cases involving AirTags, including incidents that ended in murder.
What happens after the 2022 case split
The earlier AirTag case filed in 2022 did not become a class action because the judge said state laws differ too much and each stalking claim is too individual to bundle neatly. That forced alleged victims to file separately within 28 days, and this wave of lawsuits looks like the result.
The plaintiffs are asking for damages, punitive awards, attorney fees and a court order stopping the conduct described in their complaints. Apple, meanwhile, is heading into the sort of litigation where even good product design is no substitute for a cleaner answer to the obvious question: if a tracker is easy to hide and hard to detect, how safe is ”safe enough”?