... in which I explain how Find My iPhone actually doesn't help you find your iPhone
#10-194309
Stolen iPhone police incident number
You’d like to think that in a time where we have such slick, instant feedback, don’t-big-bro-me-bro, omniscient technology… that you could actually use find-my-device location services to get your phone back! Imagine the scenario: you’ve setup your fancy-pants iPhone with Apple’s own Find My iPhone app, tested it and are feeling good about the sense that you can avoid searching for an hour before realizing it was in the car or at work. You come home from a walk to a local coffee shop and the phone is nowhere about. Fire up the re-location service…. and get sent down a long winding path of realizing that the more important part of the service can’t really do it’s job. In my case, the situation turned out to be theft. I realized this in 15-20 min when I got back home and realized the loss. Was it at the shop? Was it picked? Fire up the Mobile Me find service and….. there it was, half-way across town in another district. Phenomenal - the perp. must have had somewhere to go already. Night’s falling now and we’re driving to not-exactly-the-nicest part of town. We call the local police en route and explain the situation. They’ll meet us down the street from where the perp. is hanging out. After waiting, we see the phone has gone on the move again to a nearby house, and tell the police we can be met there instead, and are thusly informed we now have to meet them at one fixed place - gas station in the area. OK, riveting man-hunt put on hold. The police actually take almost an hour to show up. “It’s a busy night,” they tell us with all the dispassion of life-threaening emergencies. A group of sirens-blazing, don’t stop for traffic lights, police cars goes past us at different time while we wait, underscoring that some nasty stuff is happing in the area. An officer eventually shows, with one of the most flooring pieces of information that evening: they won’t help us. Why? “Because there’s no case law for police to use whatever technology you say you have there to find your lost phone.” I very-diplomatically give him the example that the same technology allows us all to get turn-by-turn driving directions. We arrive at the point that it really comes down to the need for a warrant. I propose (what I think is) a perfectly sober scenario: Go to the location of the phone, watch it move from that house, and if it’s being carried by a single person then confront them and ask for it back. A group of people will be a shell-game that needs a warrant, so basically there’s one scenario that is safe way to be gutsy and set a precedent. The officer isn’t that kind of guy, so I’m left to contemplate vigilantism and private investigators. Friends would late offer to go Punisher on the guy, but that wasn’t until after we’d bailed and headed back to maybe still get decent seats for Tron Legacy. Two slices of cheesecake comforted us instead. The big moral of this story is that phone tracking services are only useful at reminding you the phone is in the car, or maybe fell off the tractor in the East Field. So be sure you don’t pay anything for this kind of service unless you’re trying to keep tabs on children who are already well-mannered enough to stay out of trouble on their own. If it comes to police necessity, it seems they’ll leave you hanging. Thanks, Apple, and all the other companies offering services like this. Make the next into relationship formation with law enforcement and the bench.
