About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

You can't really prevent "I stole your phone just to cause chaos". What Apple did with Find My was to remove the financial incentive to steal phones. What Apple does with this is protecting your iCloud account from someone who knows your passcode. (I would imagine that most people in relationships know their partner's passcode. Sometimes relationships sour.)

What prevents "I stole your phone just to cause chaos" is the risk/reward profile. Even though your phone is useless to someone that stole it, it's still theft, and you'll still have to face consequences if caught. If the incentive is "I'll be able to buy $1200 worth of shit", then people are probably going to take their chances with getting caught. If it's "I'll get nothing except the satisfaction of smashing someone else's electronics", then most people won't take their chances.

With the whole "knowing your passcode doesn't help" situation, it makes the long tail crimes even more difficult. "Tell me your passcode or I'll shoot you" no longer works, for example. It makes the crime significantly more difficult to commit, and requires committing crimes that carry significantly longer sentences. (Armed robbery turns into kidnapping. You could be looking at the rest of your life in prison for $300 in someone's checking account. Not worth it to most people.)

At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do. The rest is your insurance company's problem. The fewer viable attacks there are against you, and the less often they happen, the less your premiums are. (I actually don't know if there is insurance for this. I should check.)

I wiped mine, but then a couple of hours before my appointment for a battery replacement they called and said due to heavy snow the techs could not get, and gave me a new appointment a couple of days later.

I didn't want to fully restore the phone for just a couple of days, so just set it up with a temporary passcode and signed in to an Apple ID I normally do not use [1], so that I could use it for that couple of days without things asking me to sign in.

After the battery replacement I then wiped it and restored from a backup under my normal Apple ID.

This mostly worked, except it messed up my Longest Move Streak with my Apple Watch. I'm not sure if this was just due to the wiping the phone part, or the having the phone on a different Apple ID than the watch for a couple days, or something else.

What the Fitness app tells me about the streak now is just weird.

The streak started on 2019-05-07 and I've not missed a day since then. The battery replacement was on 2022-12-21.

When I checked the streak in Fitness on 2023-02-04 it told me that:

  My longest streak was 39 days ending 2023-02-03
  My current streak was 1368 days

Note that it is reporting a longest streak that is entirely within what it is reporting is my current streak.

17 days later, 2023-02-21, it was reporting:

  My longest streak was 41 days ending on 2023-02-20
  My current streak was 1385 days

Note that when it thinks that the longest streak started was sometime during the previous longest streak, so that makes no sense.

A few months later, 2023-09-23, it was:

  My longest streak was 37 days ending on 2023-09-23
  My current streak was 1600 days

I hadn't checked between that last and now. Checking now, on 2024-01-22, I get:

  My longest streak was 1710 days ending on 2024-01-11
  My current streak is 1720 days

That's better in that now it thinks the longest streak and current streak started at the same time, which is correct. But it still has the longest streak in the interior of the current streak which should not be possible.

[1] I've got two Apple IDs because originally you couldn't use the same account for iTunes and their cloud service, and so everyone who wanted to use both had to have two accounts. Later they made it so one account could use both.

I'm glad it worked out in this occasion - it's definitely a success and a credit to both Waymo's processes and also the n people who were in the car after you and didn't steal it. But it just as easily could have disappeared after this woman offered to put it in a more secure location (in the hands of an employee at a business is more secure than a car that can be accessed by essentially anyone at any time).

The screen is still usable no? It just disables true tone IIRC.

A day's wage in Colombia is about $10-15 and people tend to preference and pay more for original parts since the cost of the device is too high to risk. An iPhone X costs close to a month's salary. They even tend to avoid third party cables or chargers as a consequence.

> The Waymo passenger answered and there was much giggling. She kept saying she didn't know what to do. I said just leave it in the car.

I inferred that you discussed this with the person, since you indicated you talked to them via voice. That would have been the perfect time to arrange for return of the device.

I guess after reading between the lines, this person didn't suggest this action during the voice call, only via the text you discovered afterwards?

Elsewhere you mention that leaving the phone in the car was the best course of action, but the next person in that waymo could easily have swiped it.

I suppose a middle ground could have been to tell them to put it in the back seat pocket or something so that it was a bit more hidden while you contacted waymo support to let them know to retrieve it.

> Also, tell me more about how a stranger holding a random found device authenticates a caller as the owner of said device.

This is a little much. That's quite a threat model you are operating under. It explains why you immediately wiped. I think most people are not concerned with that contingency.