Be your spy
The iCloud service “Find my iPhone” is outrageous, but incredibly useful. With the function on, you can search for a lost or stolen iPhone and even securely delete it remotely.
Lock a lost iPhone
If the lost device is selected, there are three possibilities here. Press “Play Sound” to make the iPhone or iPad play a loud beep.
Restore data
If you have remotely deleted the lost iPhone or iPad and then got it back or purchased a new iPhone as a replacement, you can make it operational immediately with the backup.
Prevention of theft or loss
In case you have lost your iPhone, and someone else has found it, it’s worth leaving contact information on your iPhone for such honest finders. This information is best to store in the emergency pass. The trick is, even if the iPhone is locked, you still have the option to make an emergency call on the home screen. If the emergency pass is configured correctly via the health app, the next contacts of the iPhone owner appear there. It is intended for rescue services, but iPhone finders can also track down the owner in this way.
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Siri
Activate Siri on another Apple device connected to the same Apple ID and say “Find my iPhone”. For this to work, “Find my iPhone” must be enabled. Siri will then try to ping your iPhone and play a sound on it.
Apple Watch
If you have an Apple Watch, you can also use it. Either with Siri, or you call the control centre of the Watch (wipe the display upwards). A symbol with a vibrating iPhone symbol makes your iPhone ring. This function can be convenient if you don’t have a desktop computer available.
Family Sharing
If you’ve also set up family sharing with relatives, your family members can locate your iPhone using their iCloud settings. Logically, this requires that both devices have “Find my iPhone” and Family Shares enabled.
Search via iCloud.com
An iOS device is not always available on the go, allowing users to search, locate or lock their lost iPhone or iPad. With icloud.com, Apple offers its iCloud users a web interface to many of the iCloud services.
You can access this website via current web browsers, such as a Mac, Windows PC or Android tablet. To access icloud.com, you need your iCloud ID and password. If you use “two-factor authentication” to protect your iCloud ID, you must request and enter a confirmation code from iCloud to access all data.
No Place to Hide - Apple knows
Since the iOS4 operating system, Apple has been collecting coordinates of iPhone, iPod and iPad users. Apple, of course, assures anonymity. Individual users cannot get traced via the coordinates. However, the company’s partners and licensees “to improve services, content, and promotions,” as they say.
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Intelligence Services
“Find my iPhone” is already a robust application for the average consumer. Imagine what the presumed data analysis applications of the secret services can do with this data.
Besides, your iPhone currently only uses the barometer function to note back floors in the health app, but what if you can read out even more data? So the secret service can probably also determine quite precisely which people are on the same floor in the same room.
Such amenities often have a downside, and you can deal with them or not.
Conclusion
“Find my iPhone” is a powerful app. It can not only be used for the actual purpose but can also be used as a tracker via family sharing. In combination with Google Maps or Apple Maps, this makes it possible to determine the approximate time of arrival.
When searching the iPhone over different floors, you can conveniently play a sound that is loud enough to perceive the tone even in the furthest corner.
We have already mentioned the dark side of such technologies. We can (no longer) change it, and if you put the advantages in the foreground, then I would never deactivate this app.
We have already reviewed other innovative Disruption Solutions by Apple:
- Practical app that works exceptionally well and allows relatively precise location search.
- You have to assume that this data will get deeply evaluated somewhere.
1 thought on “Apple Find My”
i have always wanted to use the find my iphone feature.
reading your article has given me a new perspective. i am really glad you took time to write this article. it has indeed helped me a lot.