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iPhone remains findable after power off

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Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#261

Post by manwe150 »

breakfastduck wrote: post #93
staplers wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way I don't want it spying on me. Unfortunately iOS is filled with call-homes to apple servers with all sorts of telemetry data. You can "turn off" exact lat/long coordinates (location data), however your cell provider can triangulate your position and apple can triangulate via wifi/other Apple products. Read about how Airtags work.

This is nothing to do with iOS. A cell provider can triangulate any phone connected to its network.

I think they knew that, as they mentioned they could get the location that way. Though Apple can’t use AirTags to triangulate positions, since they are just uncorrelated random number to Apple—only once they are decrypted locally can your device find the location of another device that it knows about.

The other way to be aware of by which websites do get location though is from GeoIP.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#262

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

rkagerer wrote: post #242
fsckboy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They even give you a dialog prompt now to inform you slightly tangential, I hate being informed of things when I try to do them. I'm in a hurry, I don't want to read all about something now. I wish the dialogs had an "email this to me, willya?" selection, with an opportunity to decide the long term setting that I want.

Same complaint for those annoying "how to use our website or Electron app" tutorials the first time you sign in or after updates. Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.

Sorry, but we have to :)

We added loads of genuinely useful new features to our SaaS app over the past year, such as the ability to mute notifications, quick user-switching with a PIN, and non-exclusive user role membership, and more - despite mentioning this in our monthly user newsletter we still get peppered with support emails and feature-requests for things that already exist! Additionally our feature-usage data showed that users just weren’t using them.

After we added a forced (but only 15 second long) new-feature-tour those support tickets evaporated and user-satisfaction went up.

Gotta use tough-love, it seems.

——————

Users are weird - we have a bog-standard “user menu” in the top-right corner that’s got the usual visual-affordances and opened by just hovering your name and avatars - with menu items like Logout, Switch User, Dark Mode, etc - but to our surprise the vast majority of our users simply never explore the software.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#263

Post by olliej »

defaultname wrote: post #32
AndrewStephens wrote: post #2

Umm, isn’t this, like maybe, a good thing? If I want my very expensive iPhone found, I want it found whether it is on or off. If people are worried about being tracked maybe they should carry around a device that is always broadcasting radio signals to third party towers.

For the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations, it's a very good thing and is ideal behavior. It is only in conspiratorial "but what if nation states are tracking me" noise that this is cast as a bad thing.

The find my implementation is designed to be completely anonymous.

As in apple cannot find your phone, it requires your credentials which iirc includes iCloud account and device unlock code.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#264

Post by numpad0 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #223
avianlyric wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For transit passes It’s interesting, here in the U.K. you have a legal obligation to present a valid ticket upon demand for any train you travel on. Failure to do so for any reason (including my phone died, or I dropped the ticket) is a criminal offence (and I mean criminal , not civil) punishable by a prison sentence. Some ticket conductors at the end of a long shift hearing endless excuses about why someone doesn…

Wait... is this currently a thing? Does the transit pass keep working after the phone is off? If that's the case then it must really just be keeping a single unique identifier available and broadcasting it. Also the easy fix for such an issue is to just poweroff the phone when it has ~5% of the phone power left which most phones already do. Instead of broadcasting its location, transit ID all the time it could just d…

Supposedly: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/express-cards-with-...

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#265

Post by meatmanek »

gnicholas wrote: post #237
todd3834 wrote: post #22

This article has me wondering if I’ve ever turned my phone off besides restarting it or the battery died. I’m sure I have but I bet it is very uncommon. That being said, if it were off and lost, this feature would be amazing. Apple is very transparent about it and also allows you to disable it as far as I remember. The OP has a follow up tweet that iOS 15 made their phone hot during charging. Kind of feels like they…

I would bet that a lot of owners of newer iPhones don't even know how to turn them off. It used to just require holding down the sleep/power button and then swiping across the screen. On newer iPhones, you have to (in order): hold down one of the volume buttons, then hold down the sleep/power button, then swipe across the screen. I honestly didn't know this until I just googled it. Apparently what I've been doing (vo…

You just hold either of the volume buttons + the lock/unlock button for a few seconds. Order doesn't matter.

It definitely was simpler/more discoverable back before they got rid of the home button, since the lock/unlock button wasn't pulling double duty as the Siri launcher. "Hold the button longer to shut down harder" is how computers have worked since forever.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#266

Post by olliej »

This is being bizarrely (intentionally?) treated as "apple knows where your phone is.

The only person who can find your "findable" device is you.

The find my network is anonymous - even apple cannot find an arbitrary device on it. A malicious agent with a full compromise of apple's networks cannot find your device. Apple cannot be compelled to provide the information because again, apple does not have the ability to.

The TLDR: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/find-my/

The actual technical details: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#267

Post by raverbashing »

rkagerer wrote: post #242
fsckboy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They even give you a dialog prompt now to inform you slightly tangential, I hate being informed of things when I try to do them. I'm in a hurry, I don't want to read all about something now. I wish the dialogs had an "email this to me, willya?" selection, with an opportunity to decide the long term setting that I want.

Same complaint for those annoying "how to use our website or Electron app" tutorials the first time you sign in or after updates. Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.

For real, VSCode is one of the "champions" of this. Yes, I'm sure the new Golang extension is very cool or that I need to setup this other module but for now I'm just worried about what I need to do

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#269

Post by dotancohen »

aksss wrote: post #260
wyattpeak wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds an awful lot like defences of hundred page EULAs: "So you made a decision not to read it...". No, it was intentionally designed in a way which discourages reading. In the case of this warning, it's possible that it was unintentionally designed in a way which discourages reading, but regardless the fault lies, at least in part, with the design.

It's all about timing. My computer and phone are work tools, and I can't stand the things they do at an OS and app level that get in the way of me doing my work, because most often when I do it, I'm in a really big hurry to get it done. A simple dismissible notice of "hey we need to talk later about some stuff" and an easy place to view that queue would go a long way to improving this state of affairs.

As much as I agree with you, honestly, when are you ever going to get to that queue of messages? Even my email inbox is overflowing with the not-emergency messages, as it has been doing since 2006 or so.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#270

Post by tptacek »

ncmncm wrote: post #190
kelnos wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was visiting a friend in Switzerland a few years ago, and her bag got stolen right off the back of her chair while we were in a restaurant. (The guy was quick and sneaky; by the time I ran out to the street, he was gone.) The restaurant manager called the police, and over the next 15 minutes we learned that the thief went on to try to rob the wrong person at another restaurant a couple blocks away. The intended vic…

In the US, their actual job is filing the report. Anything that goes beyond that is PR.

Wasn't my experience in Chicago. I was robbed (of my phone, at $12) and had my phone back within 15 minutes, including the time it took to call the police.
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