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Tag: Stalking

  • Apple Sued Over AirTags for Revolutionizing Scope of Stalking

    Apple Sued Over AirTags for Revolutionizing Scope of Stalking

    Apple is once again under fire over its AirTags devices, with a class-action suit filed over their use in stalking.

    Apple introduced AirTags in April 2021 as a way for individuals to keep track of items. Unfortunately, the devices were quickly used for nefarious purposes, including tagging vehicles for theft and stalking, to name just a couple. Apple announced plans to address the issues in early 2022, but that hasn’t stopped the company from facing a class-action lawsuit.

    The lawsuit (courtesy of Ars Technica) was filed in the state of California and describes the impact AirTags have had on stalking:

    One of the products that has revolutionized the scope, breadth, and ease of location-based stalking is the Apple AirTag. Introduced in April 2021, this device is roughly the size of a quarter, and its sole purpose is to transmit its location to its owner.

    The lawsuit then goes on to describe in damning detail just how AirTag works and why it is such an effective tool for stalkers:

    What separates the AirTag from any competitor product is its unparalleled accuracy, ease of use (it fits seamlessly into Apple’s existing suite of products), and affordability. With a price point of just $29, it has become the weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers.

    The AirTag works by emitting signals that are detected by Bluetooth sensors on the hundreds of millions of Apple products across the United States. These sensors comprise Apple’s “FindMy” network. When a device on the network detects a signal from the missing device, it reports that missing device’s location back to Apple, which in turn reports it to the owner.

    The ubiquity of Apple products, and their constituency in the FindMy network, means that an AirTag can more reliably transmit location data than any competitor. Indeed, in all metropolitan areas, and even many rural areas, one is never more than 100 yards away from an Apple device. Thus, one is never more than 100 yards away from having location data transmitted back to Apple.

    The lawsuit goes on to cite two murders wherein AirTags were used to stalk and track the victims.

    While Apple’s goal in creating AirTag may have been well-intentioned, the device clearly has flaws that are not being addressed adequately, flaws that have had disastrous consequences.

  • Michigan Doctor’s Body Found in Indiana Lake

    A woman’s body was recovered from a northwestern Indiana lake Sunday, and has now been identified as that of missing Michigan doctor Teleka Patrick. The cause of death is still pending further investigation, though an autopsy revealed no signs of trauma.

    Patrick, 30, of Kalamazoo, disappeared on December 5th, and was last seen in the parking lot of Kalamazoo’s Borgess Medical Center, only to apparently drive to Indiana before vanishing. Later in the night on Dec. 5, police found Patrick’s gold 1997 Lexus ES300 in a ditch on westbound I-94 in Indiana, near the Porter/Burns Harbor.

    According to Indiana State Police, divers pulled Patrick’s body from Lake Charles in Porter, roughly 15 miles east of Gary. Police and FBI agents had searched the same lake on January 23.

    Around the time of her disappearance, Patrick had been accused of stalking popular, Grammy-nominated gospel singer Marvin Sapp. Sapp came forward to reveal that he’d in the past filed a restraining order against Patrick, and that she had claimed him as her husband, had moved from California to Michigan, joined his church, had contacted his children and had been to his home. Sapp said in his complaint, “I have at least 400 pages of correspondence from her which I have never responded.”

    Video of Patrick seemingly addressing a mystery man have appeared online, which might lead to speculation that Sapp may have been the object of the doctor’s cooing.

    Regardless of the videos and restraining order revelation, Patrick’s mother has stated that she wasn’t aware of Taleka being involved in any romantic relationship.

    Patrick’s family hired private investigator Carl Clatterback, who told CNN that he’s looking into the videos. The question of who Patrick was actually directing her clips to still remains. Investigators believe the intended viewer might have some answers regarding Patrick’s death.

    Patrick’s family had launched a Facebook page entitled “Find Teleka.” It has since been changed to “Remembering Teleka.”

    Image via Facebook

  • Missing Doctor Accused of Stalking Gospel Singer

    Missing Michigan doctor Teleka Patrick had been accused of stalking popular, Grammy-nominated gospel singer Marvin Sapp, adding to the mystery of the 30-year-old’s December 5th disappearance.

    In what resembles a scenario from the defunct CBS drama ‘Without a Trace,’ Patrick was least seen in the parking lot of Kalamazoo’s Borgess Medical Center, only to apparently drive to Indiana, before vanishing. Later in the night on Dec. 5, police found Patrick’s gold 1997 Lexus ES300 in a ditch on westbound I-94 in Indiana, near the Porter/Burns Harbor.

    After failing to report to work the next day, Patrick’s family quickly grew suspicious, and launched a Facebook page in hopes of finding any information in her whereabouts.

    Now singer Sapp has come forward to reveal that he’d in the past filed a restraining order against Patrick, and that she had claimed him as her husband, had moved from California to Michigan, joined his church, had contacted his children and had been to his home. Sapp said in his complaint, “I have at least 400 pages of correspondence from her which I have never responded.”

    Patrick’s family made a statement on Facebook regarding the restraining order revelation – “We are aware of media reports that are beginning to focus on Teleka’s mental health, and while we encourage the pursuit of honest journalism and truth, we will not take part in sensationalizing Teleka’s disappearance. We believe that she has met with foul play and wholeheartedly believe that she is in danger.”

    Video of Patrick seemingly addressing a mystery man have appeared online, which might lead to speculation that Sapp may have been the object of the doctor’s cooing.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP3RZZkqr-A

    Regardless of the videos and restraining order revelation, Patrick’s mother has stated that she wasn’t aware of Taleka being involved in any romantic relationship.

    In Indiana, police brought in a K-9 unit in attempts to track Patrick’s scent. The trail went cold roughly 30 feet from where she’d left her car in the ditch. Authorities have said that though there is no evidence of foul play.

    Image via YouTube.

  • Billy Joel’s Daughter Gets Protection From Cyberstalker

    Earlier this week it was revealed that singer Billy Joel’s daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, had been cyberstalked via Facebook. According to a report from the New York Post, the stalker sent dozens of messages to Alexa, some including references to assault, pedophilia, and murder. Alexa was reportedly too frightened of the messages to leave her house.

    Billy Joel has now hired a bodyguard for his daughter. The body guard was reportedly hired from a private security firm recommended by Paul McCartney.

    Private detectives were also hired to track down the stalker, who turned out to be a woman who lives in Austin, Minnesota. The woman, Sheryl Finley, has a history of mental illness, according to the Post report.

    Alexa Ray Joel, who is 27 years old, is the daughter of Billy Joel and supermodel Christie Brinkley. Like her father, she plays the piano and is a singer-songwriter. Alexa released an independent album titled Sketches in 2006. She is also the spokesmodel for Prell shampoo.

  • Jennifer Capriati Charged For Allegedly Stalking, Hitting Ex-Boyfriend

    Less than one year after being inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, tennis prodigy Jennifer Capriati could be in trouble with the law.

    The 36-year-old Capriati has been hit with battery and stalking charges in Palm Beach County, Florida. The charges stem from an incident between the former tennis star and her ex-boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. She is alleged to have hit Ivan Brannan on that day, and is also charged with “willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly” stalking the man around Valentine’s Day in 2012.

    The New York Post has reported that Brannan told police that Capriati accosted him at a gym on Valentines day and hit him in the chest four times. The report also recounts accusations that Capriati stalked Brannan at his workplace, pounding on the windows and calling him dozens of times a day.

    Capriati has denied the allegations via Twitter, stating that Brennan is lying and that she is “outraged” about the allegations:

    (Image courtesy daramot/Wikimedia Commons)

  • Whitney Houston FBI Report Details Extortion Scheme

    In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a 128-page report into the life of singer Whitney Houston.

    According to the Detroit Free Press, the report was part of an FBI extortion case that was closed before any charges were filed. The document shows that Houston was blackmailed in 1992, with a letter from a woman stating that details of her private life would be revealed if $100,000, and later $250,000 were not paid.

    Houston had told the FBI that the woman was “a friend.” Houston’s father, John Houston, later sent the woman a “confidentiality agreement” and paid her an amount of money which was redacted in the FBI document.

    The document also contains letters from adoring fans, some of which were of interest to the FBI because the agency was afraid certain fans might hurt someone because of their obsession. FBI agents were compelled to interview several of these obsessive fans, once going as far as Brussels, Belgium. In the cases detailed, these fans were determined to not have broken the law and did not appear to have actual plans for hurting anyone or extorting Houston.

    Houston died just over one year ago, on February 11, 2012. She was found unconscious in a bathtub in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The cause of death was later determined to be an accidental drowning related to heavy drug use.

  • Don’t Worry, Facebook Creepers: Most People Are Just As Pathetic As You Are Post-Breakup

    Breaking up is hard to do. We all know that. And if severing the ties with someone that you once trusted isn’t bad enough as it is, Facebook had to come along and seriously complicate everything.

    Before Facebook, things were much simpler. Things didn’t work out with someone? Whatever, just lose their phone number or kick them out of your apartment. The worst that could happen was that you’d run into them at the grocery store and exchange awkward pleasantries. Or maybe your buddy would tell you how your ex-lover had moved on and you’d spend a night buried in cheap whiskey and screamo records.

    Those were the days.

    Now, there exists an opportunity to not only check in on your ex’s activities post-breakup, but also do everything you can to screw with them/make them jealous. And it’s there constantly. With over 900 million people on Facebook, there’s a good chance that you’ll unearth something of worth about your ex with minimal effort.

    Veronika Lukacs at Western University decided to look at how breakups are handled on Facebook for her Masters’ thesis. Why she chose this topic, I don’t know. But her study, “It’s Complicated: Romantic breakups and their aftermath on Facebook” shows us that everyone really is as big of a creeper as you think they are.

    Out of all the participants in her study, 88% copped to “creeping” on their exes. And nearly threes quarters of them said that they even creep on their exes’ new love interests.

    Here are some more interesting stats from the study:

    • Only 8% of people remained friends with their exs on Facebook.
    •  70% used a mutual friend’s profile or logged in as a mutual friend to creep their ex.
    •  64% said they re-read or analyzed old messages from their ex.
    •  50% deleted pictures of their ex from their profile.
    •  31% posted pictures to try to make their ex jealous.
    •  33% posted a song lyric or quote about their ex as their status.
    •  52% said they were jealous of a picture their ex posted.

    One thing Lukacs is sure of: Higher levels of post-breakup distress are tied to Facebook stalking.

    “The more surveillance there was, the more distress there was, but it’s difficult to say why,” Lukacs said. “Does surveillance make you more distressed, or are you distressed so you do more surveillance? My hunch is that it’s a bit of both.”

    Although we all know deep down that using Facebook to prolong the end of a bad relationship is rarely a good idea, at least this study confirms that you’re not the only one out there making that mistake.

    [h/t AllFacebook]

  • Erin Andrews And ESPN Might Split

    Erin Andrews And ESPN Might Split

    It took a while for everyone to get used to seeing women reporting from the sidelines at sporting events. Even longer to get used to women interviewing players in their locker rooms, especially when players seem to have no problem doing the interviews without their uniforms or anything else on. Now it’s not unusual at all and we can thank Erin Andrews for being one of those first lady reporters who paved the way and improved the quality and color of sports coverage for all the networks, especially at ESPN where she has been since 2004.

    According to the New York Post, Erin’s last assignment was covering the ACC tournament which ended last week. The two-year contract she signed in 2010 expires in July and so far, she isn’t scheduled to cover anything else for ESPN. Prior to working for ESPN, Andrews worked for Turner South and Fox Sports Florida. She has appeared recently on ABC as a correspondent for “Good Morning America,” and as a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars.” She has also covered a number of red carpet events including the Oscars.

    In 2008, Andrews was the victim of a stalker named Michael David Barrett. She made headlines when Barrett secretly filmed her in a hotel room and published it on the internet. The stalker was sentenced to almost three years on charges of interstate stalking and will be released later this summer. I look forward to seeing Erin’s next move and hopefully following her exciting and barrier-breaking career. She’s only 33.

    @Michael_Catt
    Michael Catt    CBS needs to turn over the tournament to Espn so there will actually be some credible analysts calling the game….especially Erin Andrews. 2 minutes ago via Twitter for Android ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @TimWood_BR
    Tim Wood    Is Leslie Visser human? That is eight kinds of some bad plastic surgery. She was original Erin Andrews … in 1976. 3 minutes ago via TweetDeck ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @LissStegman
    Liss    With my new found love of the ncaa, I’m now determined to be the next Erin Andrews 1 hour ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

  • Foobang! Is Instant Papa-Paparazzi For Your iPhone

    If keeping up with your favorite celebrities’ multiple social media accounts, latest news or rumors of what they happened to have eaten at Del Posto last night, guess what – say it with me – there’s an app for that now.

    Foobang! is a newly available app for iPhone that aggregates every bit of news information of your preferred celebrities into a source on your phone. The break down the goods on their website:

    In a matter of seconds, you can instruct Foobang! to retrieve information about your favourite stars, athletes, TV show hosts, models and politicians.

    Foobang! continuously crawls thousands of sites, blogs, and Twitter feeds for the information you want the most.

    Thanks to its push notification system, you’ll always be the first to be informed. As soon as any article on one of your favourite celebrities is published, it is instantly analysed and sent to your phone.

    If you’re wondering about the stalkery applications of this iPhone app, uh… yeah. Watch this movie that Foobang! put together that I guess is supposed to show you how easy it is to follow around celebrities but leaves me feeling very disturbed with how it’s narrated. Do they really want you to use the app this way? Ugh. Just watch it.

    See what I mean? Stalker-ific.

    If that’s your thing, though, Foobang! could be an asset to you. As you see below, it basically crawls “thousands of sites” on the Internet for every crumb of information about your victim target celebrity of choice:

    Celebrity gossip is ubiquitous enough in our culture that Foobang! isn’t really encouraging a new habit in people – it’s just streamlining the existing habits of people who already follow celebrities’ lives into one convenient iPhone app. Still, I’m pretty sure that if you use the app the way the uncomfortably curious gentleman in the Foobang! video above uses it, it’s likely that Foobang! will not pay for your court costs when you are arrested for stalking famous people who really want to eat their dinner in peace. So caveat emptor, iPhone users/celebrity followers: the app is currently available in the iPhone Apps Store.

  • Creepy Takes the Work out of Stalking

    Creepy Takes the Work out of Stalking

    As the integration of social media continues unabated, there are questions and concerns regarding the reams of data in regards to the geoweb. Be it check-in services like Foursquare or services like Twitter, which also features location-based data, provided the user wants to enable this feature, the ability to track someone based on their social media use is easier than most would suspect.

    Now, with applications like Creepy, stalking your prey developing a pattern of behavior for someone of interest, especially if they are ignorant in the ways of geo-technology, is even easier. According to Creepy’s developer, ilektrojohn, the application does the following:

    creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.

    In other words, creepy aggregates user data from Twitter, provided the user has turned on the location feature, and data from EXIF tags from photos posted to Flickr, among other image-sharing sites.

    This data is then mapped on a service like Google Maps, and presto. You can now see the geolocation profile of the user who was queried. Essentially, you’ll get a detailed geo-web based diary of the person’s movements and activities, based on their check-ins and image uploads. Granted, in order to use creepy, knowing the user name of the target in question is essential. While that isn’t much of a problem on Twitter, finding out this information about Flickr users, as well as other image services, may be more problematic. Good thing TwitPic is also represented by the creepy app.

    Now, for those of you worried about this explosion in harness-able geo-data, and fear everybody everywhere tracking your every movement, Mike Melanson over at ReadWriteWeb.com has a perspective that might put people at ease:

    So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online.

    Of course, this little tidbit at the end of Melanson’s post might make you reconsider:

    This isn’t for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums?

    Or how about unsolicited, contextual advertising based on your current location, delivered directly to your mobile device of choice? Does the idea of that creep you out? Granted, the Creepy app does nothing of the kind, but if a freelance developer can do something like this in their spare time, what kind of data collection utilities do you think companies like AT&T have?

    Here’s a little art project video from Chris Oakley showing the potential of this tracking technology. While Oakley’s work is fictional, it seems quite plausible and quite surprising:


    Still think all this geolocation data is benign?