AirTags

Police in West Seneca, New York, highlighted cases of AirTags being used to stalk women who initially did not know they were being tracked. Local news outlet WGRZ has details and comment from a senior officer.

“A female came in and she got this message notification on her phone that there was an Apple AirTag or device moving with her, so she came to the station,” West Seneca Lieutenant Jonathan Luterek said. Luterek says officers found an AirTag under the bumper of the woman’s vehicle. And just this week, a different woman got the same message on her phone.
“Officers checked over her car pretty thoroughly and weren’t able to locate it. It disconnected shortly after, so at this point it’s really unknown if it was on the vehicle, or if her phone got alerted about something nearby,” Luterek said.  Officers do not believe the two cases are connected and say there is no reason to panic, but they do want to raise awareness.

Concerns about incidents such as this were raised when the device was first launched. Indeed, the features that alerted the women were introduced by Apple to reduce the risk. It is still something to be aware of though and important to know what to do if you find yourself in such a situation.

Apple has released an update to AirTags firmware – moving from internal build number 1A291c to 1A291a. As MacRumors noted, the release comes just a week after the previous iteration was released.

We don’t know what’s included in the new firmware and no new features were found following the first release, so it likely focuses on bug fixes and other under-the-hood improvements. There is no way to force an AirTag update, as it’s something that’s done over-the-air through a connected iPhone. To make sure the update happens, you can put your AirTag in range of your ‌‌‌iPhone‌‌‌, but you have to wait for the firmware to roll out to your device.