New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a plan to tackle rising car theft rates by encouraging car owners to use AirTags to protect their vehicles. In support of the initiative, 500 of the $29 devices will be given out for free, funded by a non-profit organization called the Association for a Better New York.
The announcement, as first reported by CBS New York, comes in response to a spate of thefts in the Bronx, particularly in Hyundai and Kia vehicles. The free AirTags will be distributed in the Castle Hill, Soundview and Parkchester neighborhoods, where thefts have increased 548 percent year over year.
The sudden increase seems to be related to the discovery of a technical defect in certain car models. If a thief removes a plastic cylinder, a phone charger can be used to jump-start the vehicle, and TikTok videos have been produced showing how this works. (Hyundai responded to the story by releasing a statement detailing its “comprehensive action” to protect customers, and this can be read in full in the CBS article.)
AirTags are designed to be attached to valuable objects and can then track their location in real time and relay it to a paired iPhone or other Apple device. Many owners put them in purses or attach them to key chains, and some even buy special AirTag-ready collars for their pets so they can see where they’ve gone. But the use of AirTags to track cars, as logical as this may seem, is more often publicized from the other side of the coin: as a tool used by stalkers and other criminals to track down their victims.
A number of such cases prompted Apple to implement anti-stalking software updates to warn victims that they were being tracked without their consent. As valuable and necessary as these measures were, there were concerns that they could neutralize the effectiveness of AirTags in tackling theft. (As I wrote at the time, “If we want to catch the thief, we endanger the stalking victim; if we want to protect the stalking victim, we let the thief escape.”) The NYPD doesn’t seem to share these concerns.