Apple announces "Find My iPhone" phone-locating service

We've already had a pretty good idea about what's in store for iPhone OS 3.0, but Apple naturally still had a few tricks up its sleeve, and one of the most impressive is the new "Find My iPhone" service to help you locate your lost phone. While complete details are still a bit light, the service will apparently let you login into your MobileMe account and instantly show your iPhone on a map, and even send a message to the phone and force it to play a sound whether it's in silent mode or not. As if that wasn't enough, you can also use the Remote Wipe feature to erase all the data on the iPhone from afar and restore it to the factory settings. We guess the electric shock will have to wait for for iPhone 4.0.

[Chaoticlusts Posted Jun 8th 2009 10:31PM]

.....No reason why you couldn't do the electric shock thing with what they've implemented now....or more useful have a 'battery case' that's actually contains a small amount of thermite tie it into the data wipe function.....that way they wouldn't just lose your data but the whole phone....and possibly a bit of their leg/hand if they had in their pocket/hand at the time :P

you'd want to be damn sure you hadn't left it in a friends car though (which would be hard to tell with the tracking function unless you knew where all your friends were....try explaining to your mate why there's a melted hole in the back of his car :P

(this being said i'm a pacifict and don't condone anyone doing this but it conjures up very funny mental images :P)

[Chaoticlusts Posted Jun 8th 2009 10:32PM]

lol a pacifist* that can't spell apparently :P

[Eternal Density Posted Jun 8th 2009 10:51PM]

Is there a detonate command too? In case your lost iPhone is in 'hostile territory'.

[Calvin Foo Posted Jun 9th 2009 4:22AM]

I prefer to see "Detonate my iPhone"

or worst case "Self destruct my iPhone"

Die you all phone stealers

[Wwhat Posted Jun 9th 2009 12:28PM]

I'd sell the screen and the battery on ebay if I were a crook that stole phones in that case, so meh.

[Wwhat Posted Jun 9th 2009 12:29PM]

That was a reply to the remote-disable idea, comment went rogue it seems.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 14th 2009 6:14PM]

seriously, in this age of identity theft and whatnot, i'd like the "where am i?" fuction to be integratable to my personal website. why try to hide?

tomo

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 19th 2009 1:59AM]

Hahahahahaha!! I have a paid MobileMe account and it's so worth it.

Suckers!!!

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 27th 2009 5:21PM]

sucker, allright

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 8th 2009 4:12AM]

IMEI blocking would work fine :P

[lparker3470 Posted Sep 12th 2009 2:33PM]

there is also another service that has more features and free....

http://www.iTag.com

[cienguey Posted Jun 16th 2010 5:44PM]

Hello,

My wife lost her cell phone a couple of days ago. I decided to leave the service active in hopes that someone would use it to call one of my contacts to return the phone (that was hopeful thinking). Anyway, a couple of days after the phone was lost I was able to trace it using familymap from AT&T and I started monitoring the activity on the phone. Because of that, I have a general idea where the phone is and I have 4 phone numbers of people that this individual calls and texts. I know that the person that has the may not know much about technology otherwise they would have removed the sim card and jailbroken it. They also have no plans to sell it. It seems that they have already started publishing the number as their own :-) given that some of their friends already are calling the phone. I can see that based on the phone records. My dilemma is, how to proceed.

I called the police but they state that unless I have a direct suspect, they cannot do much. I can continue tracking the phone and wait for the person to make more mistakes and finally track them to their exact location but not sure how long that will take as familymap from AT&T is not very accurate. I can call one of their friends and confront them which may prompt them to get rid of the phone. I contemplating calling the person also and tell them that I'm the owner and that they better return the phone but that may also prompt them to get rid of it. I would like to have a little more leverage. If I only knew their name then I could tell them that I know where they live and start calling them by their name. Anyway, the reason for me posting this is to see if anyone else has any good ideas or know someone that is a good prank caller that could call to the person's friend/relatives and try to get information one way or another.