If I were them, I would try a non-technical (or at least mitigation) strategy: put a sign in their yard or on their front door that says "Sorry, we don't have your iPhone" and a description of the problem and screengrabs/URLs of articles like this.
Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
131–140 of 266 posts
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#132I had a similar experience about a month ago, when I thought I lost my iPhone 5s. Logged onto "Find my iPhone" app and it told me it was about 1km away from my house. I thought I must've dropped it somewhere nearby. So I got the address from Apple Map, drove there and knocked on the door to greet a rather defensive (obviously) lady who, of course, denied ever picking up an iphone that day. I snooped around to see if…
out of curiosity, does it only show you a single point? Does it not show you the potential error? I'm working on a mapping app that uses GPS data and the first thing we had to address was the fact that the data we got from the GPS units in the field are not perfect, they have error, hell they report their error, and our application shows that error as part of the map data. based on the data we have gotten from mobile…
Does it not show you the potential error?
I often use Find My Friends to keep track of the kids. I presume its location methodology is similar to Find My iPhone. Here's how it behaves:
About 10% of the time, it doesn't show a current location at all for the kid. It does remember the previous one, so it will show a location and say something like "46 minutes ago".
When it does display a location, about 60% of the time it's a single spot.
The remaining 30% of the time it is a spot enclosed by a tinted circle. That circle can be a few hundred feet in diameter, or it can be more than 5 miles in diameter. This is the potential error. However, I'd bet that 95% of the people looking at it don't understand the concept of "potential error". So to them, the enclosing circle doesn't exist.
Edit: forgot to add, about 2% of the time it will show an "exact" location, what I called a "spot", no "potential error" circle. Then a minute later it will show a different exact location a few miles away. Then a minute later yet a third exact location another mile or two away. So in other words, about 2% of the time it is really confused (the kid is stationary the whole time).
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems much more likely that there is some bogus location data set somewhere that improperly links SIDS and GPS coordinates or filters fail and result some index into a GPS table that happens to correspond to this couple's home. If I were these two people, I'd contact the local police department every single time anyone shows up at their house and require that the PD fill out a report of some kind and keep it in a…
---> It's bullshit that police are coming to the door and dragging them outside while trying to determine if a search warrant is in order. I think this is the biggest issue! Their rights where violated.
What rights are you referring to? The police seem to have done everything correctly. These were individuals who were being detained pursuant to an investigation of an ongoing crime. The police did not search the inside of the house without a warrant - though, it's unclear why not - if they had strong belief that there was a crime in progress, they had every legal right to do so.
I guess the only thing in question is whether "missing child" was precise enough to be upgraded to "crime" in this jurisdiction. I think that, given the evidence, the police did everything correctly; being detained pursuant to an investigation isn't a great inconvenience (though, some accommodation should be made to allow people to use washroom facilities if investigation is extensive - just obviously not in the house under investigation.)
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#134What's sad is how the local police seem to have some sort of learning disability or amnesia about this problem. They showed up there repeatedly and harassed the occupants.
I have a friend who's been a cop in the area for a few years and I recall him complaining about some circumstance that caused him to have to visit a house several times over a weekend (I want to say it was a monitored alarm system on an unoccupied residence that was malfunctioning). He said that despite knowing with complete certainty that it was a false alarm, he was required to treat it as though a crime in progress could be happening.
I'm going to hazard a guess that a similar situation exists here -- a citizen complains and involves the police, they probably have no choice but to treat it as though "maybe this time the phone is really there". It may not be up to the local police, it could very well be a county/state regulation or law that causes that.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#135> Lekei said by email that the couple’s router could be causing the problem; if misconfigured, it could be broadcasting that it’s a different location than it actually is
Wait, what? Is my router broadcasting a location to someone? What technology is this, and how do I make sure my router isn't doing it?
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the industry should assign a bit in the BSSID to indicate a mobile AP that shouldn't be used for mapping purposes.
Maybe private data like BSSIDs shouldn't be used for mapping purposes in the first place.
> Maybe private data like BSSIDs...
Is it private when you're screaming it on the street corner for everyone to hear? If we're talking about vocal utterances, the law says "no".
It's... disappointing that the addition of a computer to a activity makes people lose sight of the similarities between that activity and very similar ones that have long-settled legal treatment.
Edit: To drive the point home: There are many jurisdictions that require you to affix your street number to the exterior of the building in which you live using numerals that are sufficiently large to be read clearly from across the street. Noone would honestly make the claim that the data provided by those numerals is in any way private information, and that broadcasting your street number to everyone who was walking or driving by is in any way a breach of privacy. :)
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#137My money is on a wifi SSID that matches the one used by thieves or a heavily-trafficked location the victims all pass through. My company moved ~5 blocks and it really screwed up the map on my phone (which I use to get around the city) for several months. My company had left the network SSID the same in the old location, so that no one had to re-configure their wifi. Even with GPS on, my phone was always convinced it…
I'd guess MAC address is more important that SSID. (If this were me, I'd want to somehow covertly install that router at Google/Apple/Skyhook/the-local-police-station, I suspect that'd pretty quickly get someone to give-a-shit enough to solve the problem...)
To my knowledge this is not done by SSID but by MAC. You could spoof the router with a wifi pineapple. Put it in a church.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#138> Lekei said by email that the couple’s router could be causing the problem; if misconfigured, it could be broadcasting that it’s a different location than it actually is Wait, what? Is my router broadcasting a location to someone? What technology is this, and how do I make sure my router isn't doing it?
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#139I found this particularly disturbing: > In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him. > > “Your…
> The police shouldn't be able to detain someone for over an hour without probably cause and without arresting them.
Once I got stopped and they decided they were going to get a drug dog, and then a warrant, for my car.
"Am I being detained?", I asked. "No, you're free to go." "Wait, I can just get in my car and drive away?" "Oh no, we're holding your car as evidence." I was in the middle of nowhere.
I don't know under what grounds they can do that (or if it was actually legal), but the grounds are presumably much less then actually detaining you. But it amounts to the same thing. I don't know on what grounds they could prevent people from going back in their home even if they aren't being detained (are you really going to leave and not observe whatever the cops are going to do to your home?).
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#140Based on my experience with a few phones I own, there's a few things that could be happening here:
It was mentioned the "SSID"/MAC address problem. It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID and are encountering a MAC address collision (assuming MAC address is always taken into account, which I'm not sure that it is). Their router is likely part of some database that the GPS uses when the phones enter an area with WiFi but no cellular service or line of sight to the satellites. I had a similar failure every time I went indoors to an archery facility I visited weekly for three months. Both my wife's and my phone would think we were a clear 30 miles away in another city the second we got far enough into the building to lose cellular service. I dug into it and discovered it was using WiFi APs to get location. I think the archery place has another location in that other spot, so it's possible they swapped WiFi gear at some point, but it's anyone's guess.
Another possibility, hinted at in the article, is that there's no other location data available to the stolen phone (no mapped WiFi, no cellular service) but it has an IP address so the devices are falling back to Geo IP which is extremely inaccurate (my IP address changed recently and I am now a Canadian according to location services on my PCs with no GPS capabilities -- 200 miles off). It could be a circumstance of "that IP isn't known, but that block is owned by x ISP and here's a general location of where that is ... only the little dot happens to land on their house.
It would be really smart for apps that track location for theft purposes to keep a reasonable history. If it's a mobile phone, the last known high-accuracy reading from the GPS should be presented along with lower accuracy results to help in situations like this. I'd imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult to correlate several readings over a period of time and discard ones that are clearly not sane (as would have been the case with my phone in the archery place). A bonus would be to perform other actions when the device is marked "stolen", like take photos at certain intervals and upload them to the cloud to make it easier to "prove" your phone is in the hands of someone it shouldn't be (one of the tools I had did something like this).