Jenna was commuting to work on the Yellow Line and catching up on emails Friday morning when an AirDrop request popped up on her phone screen with, in her words, a “picture of a big old penis on it.”

AirDrop is a service that allows Apple users in close proximity to send one another photos, videos, and documents via WiFi or Bluetooth. If a person tries to share content, a dialogue box will pop up on the recipient’s screen that includes a preview of the image, along with the option to either accept or decline the content in question.

“I felt violated,” says Jenna, who asked that we only use her first name. “There were at least 15 people on the car. No one was giggling or doing anything that would make me think, ‘It’s definitely them.’ I was thinking, ‘Don’t give them the satisfaction, almost be still, pretend it didn’t happen,’ because they’re probably looking for a reaction.”

The trend of AirDropping an unsolicited dick pic to a stranger was first reported on public transportation in London in 2015, and “cyber flashing” has similarly occurred in New York City subways in the subsequent years. This past November, two members of the New York City Council proposed legislation that would make it a misdemeanor to send sexually explicit videos or images to a person with the intent to harass or annoy them, punishable by up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine, though the measure faces some technological hurdles—in particular, the difficulty of determining the culprit.

Jenna, who lives in Northern Virginia and takes the Metro into Archives each week day, says she did not report the incident to the station manager because there was no one at the kiosk when she arrived. “I’m not going to let this person derail my life and make me late for work,” she says.

“As with any incident of harassment or inappropriate activity, we encourage customers to report these to Metro Transit Police immediately,” says Metro spokesperson Sherri Ly over email. “The nature of airdrop technology is such that if set to ‘everyone’ then any person near you can send you an image. For this reason, we encourage the public to change their airdrop permissions to ‘off’ or ‘contacts only.'”

That mirrors the reaction Jenna says she’s received from loved ones that she found “upsetting”—”they would say, ‘that’s horrible, but why did you turn [AirDrop] on?'” She says she had used AirDrop the previous night for her work as an events planner and social media coordinator, and didn’t turn it off afterwards. “It seems almost silly and petty, but at the same time, it was a huge invasion of privacy,” she says. “I felt dirty. It’s not like someone actually grabbed me or touched me, but it’s in my head. My day is now colored by that.”

According to a 2018 report released by Metro, about 21 percent of passengers have experienced sexual harassment on public transit in the D.C. region, slightly higher than the national average of 17 percent. About two-thirds of customers who experienced harassment did so while riding the train, and women are almost twice as likely as men to experience harassment. The most common form of sexual harassment experienced on Metro property is verbal harassment, followed by leering and being rubbed up against in a sexual way. Half of the time, victims do not report the incident to Metro.

“Mobile devices are certainly adding a new element to street harassment,” says Holly Kearl, the founder of Stop Street Harassment, which has collaborated with Metro on anti-sexual harassment ads in the system. In addition to “cyber flashing,” Kearl points to a reported increase in upskirting, in which someone takes a photo up a victim’s dress or skirt. “It’s all the same core issue: invading someone’s space in a disrespectful, creepy, and, in some cases, illegal way.”

Kearl also endorses people reporting any incidents of sexual harassment, even if, like in Jenna’s case, it’s not clear who the perpetrator was. “Even if it doesn’t end in legal action, the main point of reporting is to look for patterns,” she says.

After Jenna tweeted out her experience, another woman chimed in to say she too had been sent a dick pic over AirDrop on Metro in the past few weeks. A few hours after the incident, Jenna said she was “in the anger phase, wishing I had stood up and said something or done something. I didn’t—I froze … But realistically, if it happened again tomorrow, I don’t know if I would do anything any different.”

Kearl says that getting cyber flashed is “probably pretty jarring and upsetting, so people who experience it should know they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not their fault.”

What sticks with Jenna is the notion that whoever sent her the lewd photo was somewhere near her: “If someone is willing to do that, that’s not a person that I necessarily want to be in a metal tube under the ground with for 20 minutes.”