A Columbia, Tennessee family says their trip to Disney World was ruined after they discovered that someone may have used an Apple AirTag to stalk them during their activities at the Florida amusement park.
The Gaston family from Tennessee had spent a day enjoying themselves at Disney World, but they then saw a notification on an iPhone about an AirTag they didn’t own tracking their movements around the Magic Kingdom.
Jennifer Gaston says she and daughter Madison were walking to their car late in the evening when they received a notification that an AirTag was moving with them, reports WKRN.
“I had no idea, no idea what an Air Tag was. Like, I was clueless,” Jennifer said. “It stated that it was first detected with her at 7:09 p.m. and we got the notification at about 11:33 p.m.”
Madison clicked on it and saw a map displaying all the places they had walked over the last four hours.
“It showed the first destination where it was detected with her, then it basically draws a line and makes the connections of the points where she had been,” Jennifer said.
The Gaston family shook out all of their bags and clothing in the Disney World parking lot, jumped into their truck, and drove back to their hotel without locating the AirTag. They notified the police on the way.
When an AirTag is found, police can use the tag’s serial number to reach down its owner. However, since a physical tag wasn’t found, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said the responding deputy did not identify a criminal violation. However, investigators did take an incident report and acknowledge that they are aware of the situation.
The Sheriff’s Office said that while it is possible that an AirTag fell and went missing in the park, it could have been a mistaken identification. The sheer number of Apple devices in the park, as well as the possibility of numerous AirTags in the area, could have produced an “erroneous” detection.
“As a parent, I was just so frantic in the moment,” Jennifer told the report. “Just to think that somebody had those intentions. Looking at your daughters and just having those intentions, it was just terrifying.”
This report is just the latest in a series of reports of possible stalking by using an AirTag to track an unsuspecting subject. However, most previous incidents involved a stalker secreting an Airtag in a car or on the person of an unsuspecting subject.
