Former Love Island star Montana Brown talked about the “creepy” moment she realised someone was “tracking” her location by dropping an AirTag in her luggage at the airport. Montana, who is pregnant with her first child, was flying to LA when she discovered the Apple tracking device.
Speaking on her Instagram stories, the 27-year-old warned people to be extra cautious when travelling abroad.
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She said she received a notification on her iPhone that told her there was an AirTag on her person which did not belong to her.
“I landed in LA and got this notification on my phone like, ‘There's an air tag on your person that doesn't belong to you and it's from nobody in your contacts so someone can see your location.’
“I was like, this is weird. I rummaged around, and didn't see anything. When I went to the loo after I'd gone through security, I found an AirTag in my bag that was tracking my location.
“Beware when you're travelling, if you're travelling on your own because apparently this is a thing,” she said.
The influencer then appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and explained the ordeal in further detail, adding that the whole incident really “spooked” her.
“As soon as I got through security, I was kind of brushing (it) off at this point: 'Oh, it was probably nothing.'
“It was only until I went to the toilet and kind of emptied everything out of my bag that it was at the bottom of my bag so that was really alarming because I genuinely had no idea that somebody was even that close to me to be able to put it into my bag,” she said.
The star added: "I kind of panicked and just flushed it down the toilet because I was in the toilet anyway and I just thought because I was so kind of spooked and I was really surprised that I actually found anything.
"That's the first time I've been on my own, really, and felt very unsafe and I just wanted to kind of get out of the airport as quickly as possible.
"But it definitely was a shocking experience because you kind of like go down a rabbit hole of: 'What would they then have done next, and what would they have tracked my location for?"'
Apple said it "condemns any malicious use" of its products and "incidents of AirTag misuse are rare".
It said: "Unwanted tracking has long been a societal problem, and we took this concern seriously in the design of AirTag.
"It's why the Find My (iCloud) network is built with privacy in mind, uses end-to-end encryption, and why we innovated with the first-ever proactive system to alert you of unwanted tracking. We hope this starts an industry trend for others to also provide these sorts of proactive warnings in their products."
"We will continue to listen to feedback and innovate. We've built a tunable system of deterrents which we are committed to making improvements to over time."
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