Armed with a computer application called MobileMe, Hootnick pursued the iPad she believed was stolen after she left it on an American Airlines plane in New York City. After she called Lost and Found and left messages, she logged on to MobileMe, which lets you track your electronics via GPS. So she did — and saw it was at an address in Long Island, N.Y. 
 
 Sally then contacted American Airlines and police at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey to tell them her iPad was taken and she knew exactly where it was. She continued to watch her iPad remotely while waiting for the police to act. “I was frustrated after days of this. So I sent a message to the iPad,” Hootnick said. “The next day my iPad started traveling. Then she watched it travel to the Los Angeles airport and back to JFK, to the San Francisco airport and back to JFK. With the device traveling that often, Hootnick suspected the iPad was being used by an airline employee. Hootnick then used another application to make the iPad beep every two minutes along with the messages saying she knew where it was and that she'd called the cops, as well as contacting American Airlines again. A month later when no one acted, Hootnick emailed the airline that she was going to contact a consumer protection agency. She had two more conversations with a police detective asked by American Airlines to look into the case. American Airlines isn't commenting on the ongoing investigation, and officials with the Port Authority have not returned calls from The Post-Standard. When she replaced the device she turned off the wireless service to the old iPad, and that means she can no longer track it.
– There's an app for pretty much everything—except cutting through bureaucracy. A woman who mistakenly left her iPad on a plane was able to track the whereabouts of the device, but couldn't convince authorities to follow up on it, reports the Syracuse Post-Standard, via the Consumerist. The woman was fairly certain she left the iPad on a plane after deboarding in New York City, and after leaving messages with American Airlines, she used the GPS function of MobileMe to find that the iPad was in a house on Long Island. She contacted airline and law-enforcement authorities with the exact location, but no action was taken. She suspects an airline employee pocketed the iPad because it then made several trips back and forth between JFK airport and California. She can't trace it anymore because she replaced the iPad and shut off wireless service to the old one. At one point, she used an app to make it beep every two minutes. “I just wanted to harass who ever took it,” she said. “I didn’t want him to enjoy it if he was using it.”