Neat feature I guess, but how long before thieves realize that they can just look up your home or work address from the Maps or Contacts app and go stand near it to get around these restrictions?
About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#52This also solves a somewhat unique problem I experienced recently with iCloud keychain where all your passwords are only as secure as your passcode (and anyone that knows it). I had to hand my phone over to a third party repairer. This would mean they needed to know my passcode so I wanted to lock down the phone to allow them to perform whatever diagnostic steps they might need but to restrict access to the wallet an…
What hardware repair would require handing over your passcode? If it's to test that the phone is working fine after the repair, can't you test it yourself in front of them before you pay? If they were doing software repairs, what would be the nature of the repair? Hard for me to imagine anything to repair software-wise, given how iOS is.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#53A one hour delay? Really? I don’t get it, how does that really help?
If you're robbed at gunpoint, and they demand you unlock your phone for them, this protection means they would have to kidnap you for at least an hour to then unlock it again. The former happened pretty regularly, but upgrading to kidnapping is a lot riskier, more dangerous, and invites a serious police response.
And if it takes more then an hour to get to a computer I can use? What if I’m wait to report it to the police? Seems like it should be a day.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#54A one hour delay? Really? I don’t get it, how does that really help?
> In the event that your iPhone is stolen, the security delay is designed to prevent a thief from performing critical operations so that you can mark your device as lost and make sure your Apple account is secure. Learn what to do if your iPhone is lost or stolen.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're robbed at gunpoint, and they demand you unlock your phone for them, this protection means they would have to kidnap you for at least an hour to then unlock it again. The former happened pretty regularly, but upgrading to kidnapping is a lot riskier, more dangerous, and invites a serious police response.
And if it takes more then an hour to get to a computer I can use? What if I’m wait to report it to the police? Seems like it should be a day.
> Security Delay: Some security actions such as changing your Apple ID password also require you to wait an hour and then perform a second Face ID or Touch ID authentication.
Emphasis mine.
It seems like you have a lot of reasonable questions and concerns about the efficacy of this measure, but Apple have done a pretty good job of addressing them and explaining their rationale in the first few paragraphs of the documentation.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#56This also solves a somewhat unique problem I experienced recently with iCloud keychain where all your passwords are only as secure as your passcode (and anyone that knows it). I had to hand my phone over to a third party repairer. This would mean they needed to know my passcode so I wanted to lock down the phone to allow them to perform whatever diagnostic steps they might need but to restrict access to the wallet an…
You took unnecessary risk. Wipe your device before handing it over, and restore it from a backup after the repair. Also consider evil maid, or other kinds of backdoors (like jailbreaks).
It’s a risk. But it also takes a few hours to restore from backup and there’s a bunch of things that (sensibly) don’t restore and require manual setup.
I know Apple will never ask for your passcode but in the case of a repair shop that promises 15 minute service it’s kinda necessary unless you want it to take far longer and annoy them.
Ultimately with it locked down with screentime the only personal data I had an issue with was iCloud Keychain. Honestly I don’t know why Apple lets children access the full settings anyway. It would be trivial to add a screen time restriction for all features of settings except the screentime pane.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#57This also solves a somewhat unique problem I experienced recently with iCloud keychain where all your passwords are only as secure as your passcode (and anyone that knows it). I had to hand my phone over to a third party repairer. This would mean they needed to know my passcode so I wanted to lock down the phone to allow them to perform whatever diagnostic steps they might need but to restrict access to the wallet an…
What hardware repair would require handing over your passcode? If it's to test that the phone is working fine after the repair, can't you test it yourself in front of them before you pay? If they were doing software repairs, what would be the nature of the repair? Hard for me to imagine anything to repair software-wise, given how iOS is.
Anything that requires turning off the phone will need a passcode once it powers on. This includes battery replacement, screen, microphone, camera, etc. Only for camera repairs is it feasible to test fully without entering a passcode.
Of course you could leave the testing until you pick it up and pay but then if something is faulty you’ll have to come back later and wait longer when they might have been able to repair beforehand if they’d known.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> She offered to leave the phone in a pharmacy across town! I don't know how that would've helped. Well for one, the pharmacy isn't moving.
I would say that moving the phone from the place I left it would promote it from "lost" to "stolen". Can you now envision a conversation between this passenger and the pharmacy clerk: "I found this phone in some car" "What do you want me to do about it?" "Hold on to it until some guy I don't know comes to claim it?" "We don't want this personal property! Go away!" [Waymo car is gone now] [Passenger absconds with phon…
Honestly I can't envision that conversation happening between two real people. What is much, much more likely to actually happen in my experience:
"I found this phone."
"Ok." takes it
You go in later "I lost my phone, do you have it here?" and they hand it to you. For particularly fastidious store clerks they may ask you to describe it before handing it over. And you likely have to wait while whoever you ask asks all the other employees if they found a phone.
It's not clear to me that letting the phone just sort of drift through the ether toward the Waymo Depot while who knows how many other passengers use the car is any better than putting the phone at some other fixed location behind at least some cursory level of security.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#59So the next step for the criminals (the ones who steal both the passcode and phone) is to find your address (often stored in Contacts, or available in your Amazon account) then physically go there and lurk nearby while finishing their pwning steps. I may be missing something. But if not it seems like Apple is now incentivizing a scenario where thieves will physically go to the location of their victims homes in order…
This is time sensitive. The criminals would lose too much time doing that. At least for the “criminal use case “ in Brazil, where they want to quickly access your bank app, this wouldn’t work.
Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone
#60I don’t know if Brazil was one of the places that convince Apple to do that, but we have a huge problem of mobile phones robbery with that aim to access the bank apps to drain accounts dry.
In a quite resourceful way (social engineering, process and system exploits) these criminal organizations will jump all the hoops (2FA, Face Recognition) and manage to access most of those apps.