A federal judge in the Northern District of Florida has refused to grant AirTag stalking pseudonymity to a plaintiff suing Apple Inc., declining to follow rulings by courts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, New York, and Arizona that permitted similar claimants to proceed under fictitious names.
Judge Kent Wetherell issued the ruling in Doe v. Apple, Inc., rejecting the plaintiff’s motion even in the absence of opposition from Apple. The plaintiff alleged that a former partner used an Apple AirTag to track her location, and sought anonymity on the basis that the litigation would require disclosure of intimate details relating to domestic violence and sexual harassment.
The Eleventh Circuit Standard on Pseudonymity
Judge Wetherell applied the governing Eleventh Circuit test, under which a party may proceed anonymously only by establishing ‘a substantial privacy right which outweighs the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings.’ Courts in that circuit have frequently declined to grant that protection even in sexual assault cases, the judge noted, ‘even when revealing the plaintiff’s identity may cause her to suffer some personal embarrassment.’
The court found the plaintiff’s safety concerns too speculative to justify departure from that presumption. Her fear that identifying herself would give her stalker ‘a direct avenue to confirm her location, continue his surveillance, and further interfere with her safety’ could be addressed through a protective order or the targeted sealing of specific documents, the judge ruled.
Judge Wetherell drew on the Eleventh Circuit’s 2020 decision in In re Chiquita Brands International, in which the circuit court affirmed a district court’s refusal to grant anonymity even after paramilitaries had threatened and attacked a named bellwether plaintiff and her family. The Eleventh Circuit in that case found the evidentiary basis for inferring a causal link between the plaintiff’s litigation role and the attacks to be insufficient, resting only on an attorney’s affidavit derived from secondhand accounts. That the threats there were more concrete than anything alleged in the present case made the outcome in the Apple litigation straightforward, the court implied.
That same Chiquita litigation has continued to generate Eleventh Circuit activity: on 30 January 2026, the circuit heard oral arguments over a $38.3 million bellwether jury verdict against Chiquita Brands International, described as the first time an American jury held a major US corporation liable for human rights abuses abroad, with the tone of oral argument suggesting a potential reversal.
Why the AirTag Stalking Pseudonymity Split Matters
Judge Wetherell acknowledged the 2024 decision in Doe v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. from the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which permitted a plaintiff in a materially similar SmartTag stalking case to proceed anonymously. He declined to follow it on two grounds: it applied Third Circuit law, not Eleventh Circuit law; and the Pennsylvania court had not addressed whether a protective order could adequately mitigate the plaintiff’s safety concerns. The Justia record for that case shows the litigation involved separate disputes over mandatory arbitration as well.
Courts in the Eastern District of Virginia, the District of Nevada, the Eastern District of New York, and the District of Arizona also allowed AirTag stalking victims to proceed anonymously, but those rulings came in text-only orders without analysis and were not grounded in Eleventh Circuit precedent.
The circuit split on pseudonymity in stalking device litigation sits within a broader wave of claims against Apple. On 15 March 2024, Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California allowed certain claims in a consolidated class action to survive a motion to dismiss, finding that harm from stalking was a foreseeable consequence of making and selling a tracking device. The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology reported that the class complaint described the AirTag as having ‘revolutionised the scope, breadth, and ease of location-based stalking,’ pointing to its small size, $29 retail price, and high locational accuracy as features that facilitate misuse.
The procedural consequence of Judge Wetherell’s ruling in the Northern District of Florida case is that the plaintiff must either litigate under her real name or face dismissal. According to the Law360 case record for Doe D.C. 1 v. Apple, Inc., a Florida federal judge subsequently struck a separate AirTag stalking lawsuit brought by a woman against Apple, indicating that Northern District judges have taken a sceptical posture toward this category of claim.
The divergence between circuits on the pseudonymity question means plaintiffs’ forum choices in AirTag stalking litigation carry real procedural stakes: a case filed in the Eleventh Circuit is materially harder to pursue anonymously than the same case filed in the Third Circuit. Whether any plaintiff seeks to transfer or refile in a more favourable venue may be the next decision worth watching.
