notANON

I was listening to a comedy podcast and one of the guys told this awesome story about how he got his iPad back from someone who stole it at a super market.  One of the OTHER guys on the show had just lost his iPhone a couple of weeks before that and lamented about how he wished he had set up a program to track it’s location.  Luckily, after that event, everyone else on the show enabled Apple’s free app “Find my iPhone”.  Find my iPhone works on any newer iDevices such as ipads, 4th gen iPod Touches and 3g+ iPhones.

Enabling it is simple.  You go and download the free app from the app store.  Then you enable a mobile me account which seems partially deprecated but is still used for this service.  To enable it, you go into settings -> mail, contacts -> add account -> mobile me.  You then sign in with you Apple ID.  At that point, you may or may not be required to confirm your email address.  After all that, you slide a switch to enable find my iphone.

When all that is done, you can sign into the app and track the device you are on, which is pretty useless or you can track any other devices that you have access to track.  If you only have one device, you can sign into the Find my iPhone web app here:

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/find-my-iphone.html

So for all of the collective bitching about how iPhones track your location, this seems like a pretty fair trade to me overall.  This does bring up points though of subpoenas and forensics where it’s conceivable that you could be arrested for something, the police can confiscate and search your iPhone without a warrant and then potentially see that you have this app installed and contact Apple to retrieve records beyond what the phone itself stores.  If your story doesn’t match what the records say, you could be in deep shit really quick.  This reminds me of an EXCELLENT video I saw on YouTube the other day about how you should never talk to the police under any circumstances since you can nearly never help your case.  It was a presentation give by a lawyer and a police officer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc