iPhone remains findable after power off
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I'm not sure why this is presented as some new thing, or a gotcha or whatever this is. We've known about it for months... And IMO, it's a positive change although it does sound a little weird.
slightly tangential, I hate being informed of things when I try to do them. I'm in a hurry, I don't want to read all about something now. I wish the dialogs had an "email this to me, willya?" selection, with an opportunity to decide the long term setting that I want.
The worst time to try to tell me about new features is right when I'm firing up my web meeting client to join a meeting that's about to start.
Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.
We added loads of genuinely useful new features to our SaaS app over the past year, such as the ability to mute notifications, quick user-switching with a PIN, and non-exclusive user role membership, and more - despite mentioning this in our monthly user newsletter we still get peppered with support emails and feature-requests for things that already exist! Additionally our feature-usage data showed that users just weren’t using them.
After we added a forced (but only 15 second long) new-feature-tour those support tickets evaporated and user-satisfaction went up.
Gotta use tough-love, it seems.
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Users are weird - we have a bog-standard “user menu” in the top-right corner that’s got the usual visual-affordances and opened by just hovering your name and avatars - with menu items like Logout, Switch User, Dark Mode, etc - but to our surprise the vast majority of our users simply never explore the software.
If you think that's bad, when we overhauled some incompetently written code (from a dodgy contractor before I joined) that stored passwords using reversible-encryption (ARGH!) - which was for a "feature" that allowed tenant-admins to reveal their own users' passwords (WTFBBQ!) - and switched to using correctly hashed+salted passwords we had dozens of support calls from angry/frustrated (and yet unsophisticated...) users who said they were no-longer able to login because they never bothered to remember their password, they'd just ask their tenant-admin to tell them their own password (aiaaiaiiaiaiia) and now they couldn't do it anymore. We asked why they couldn't use the forgot-password page or a magic-link to login and they said it doesn't work because they all used fake e-mail addresses for their users (*dies*) (these tenant accounts were all set-up before things were fixed, and accounts with invalid/unverified e-mail addresses were just grandfathered-in).
We do also support OIDC (we are our own IdP, as well), so to try to make things easier for our users we'll be adding O365/AzAD soon, with sign-in-with-Google (and maybe sign-in with Facebook... excuse me while I take a cold shower) so at least some users can dispense with having a separate user-account they need to remember details for.
...so things were awful, now they're just bad, and they're getting better - but things could always be worse: Our main competitor is an on-prem VB6 app that pushes data to a "cloud" (i.e. Internet-exposed) SQL Server running off a business/residential IP address with a hardcoded SQL login userID and password shared by everyone (all of their tenants!).
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...this is what the LoB software world is like. There is so much room for improvement everywhere - but all the competent uni grads join some glamorous FAANGMA company after school (well, I'm guilty of that myself...) - but I wish they'd consider un-sexy LoB software: it pays much better than FAANGMA provided you're competent and know how to negotiate. I think the LoB area gets a bad rep just because it's generally where (for want of a better phrase) less-talented people end-up which brings down the average total-comp.
I'm rambling at 3am again, ugh...
Also it’s very easy to reopen later which was the OP complaint against popups. Now that I think about it, VSCode is pretty much best in class when it comes to update content notifications.
The modal dialog could be replaced with a toggle on the same screen as the power off slider in place of that text, and maybe one day it will be. But right now, since the feature is novel, it's probably worth it to have the extra bit of text so people know what the options are that they're selecting between. As far as slowing you down, you're shutting down your phone. If you only want to temporarily turn this off, yes, you're slowed down by about 0.5 seconds But if you are really concerned about this feature you've also had opportunities while using the phone to disable it so that it is permanently off in which case you can just use the power off slider and be done with it.
We ran an A/B test on some 3-pane and 8-pane versions of these at my last job and on the long ones with a "dismiss" button IIRC it took our users something like 3.4 panes to hit it on average. The long ones without the dismiss button got people to view panes 7 and 8 a lot more often but there was a noticeable (albeit small) uptick in users who left the site entirely instead of finishing.
No, it was intentionally designed in a way which discourages reading. In the case of this warning, it's possible that it was unintentionally designed in a way which discourages reading, but regardless the fault lies, at least in part, with the design.
Which also benefits the legal community by keeping them in a job, obviously. "Get it checked by legal/my lawyer" rather than just reading what you're signing up to is definitely a thing. I wish the legal system was more focused on clarity and common sense rather than the hard letter of the law.
One would think that a group of people so familiar with Latin would understand the potential consequences of this. That the masses were able to read Protestant literature but unable to read Catholic literature was one of the major factors that allowed the Reformation to occur.
The problem is that this was not done by a conscious decision but by a slow progression of a system. Bad actors getting away because of wording not being airtight etc.
Perhaps what could be done is enforcing the key points of legal agreement to appear at the top in clear language. We're already seeing some of such initiatives like Apple's privacy information section in the app store.
If the average user blows past this message, it has no impact on their life.
In other news I updated my phone to iOS 15 and put it down to charge last night. When I woke up it was hot, and my battery has gone from 100% to 15% since 7:30am. I gotta get off this ecosystem.
"My phone's battery life has suddenly become much worse" sure sounds like a major impact to me.
The turned off pings use an ultra low power mode similar to the airtags which should last months on a "flat" battery.
No. The phone got charged. That’s made clear in the quote. Something is draining it post-charge.
So it works best for everyone. The average person can track their stolen phones now. And people hiding from the government can still turn it off.
I actually thought this was very old, added a year or so ago. I guess it got delayed?
I've had two phones stolen (right out of my hands) that were immediately shut down and sim cards ejected to prevent them from being tracked. While I'm sure this feature wouldn't help me get back a phone, I hope it does deter this.
Edit: I think this was announced back in 2019 WWWDC https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet... ?
The restaurant manager called the police, and over the next 15 minutes we learned that the thief went on to try to rob the wrong person at another restaurant a couple blocks away. The intended victim held the guy down until the police arrived. The restaurant manager led us over to the other restaurant.
The police managed to recover nearly everything that was stolen, by going through the guy's pockets, and also doing a search in a nearby alleyway, where he had dumped my friend's bag and some of the less-concealable items he'd stolen from people. One thing (can't remember what) was still missing from my friend's bag, and the police took down information about it and told her who to contact to follow up in case it was found.
It was easily the best experience I've ever had with police anywhere (I live in the US but travel fairly frequently). I wish all police could be like that. (Granted, this was just a single experience with two specific officers; who knows if the rest in their precinct or even country are on average that good. But it was definitely encouraging.)
I recount this to suggest that in places with police that don't suck, maybe this sort of thing could actually be a decent anti-theft feature. But agreed that police in the US don't care. I was once mugged and had $3000 worth of stuff stolen from me (laptop and two phones), and the police clearly filed my report to /dev/null. Another friend of mine had her iPad stolen once, and she ended up tracking it down on her own (not the safest thing she's done) because the police told here there was "nothing they could do" even though she showed them the tracking information.
Living in the US has probably skewed my impressions of police generally.
I strongly believe "Find My iPhone" has made iPhones significantly less valuable on the resale market and will have reduced thefts
I often see people here referring to their country without mentioning the actual country, i.e. they hide the interesting detail, which I find weird. Why not to write "in Iceland..." instead? Or is it a privacy thing or just some kind of modesty?
Something like this could further deter the portion of thefts that end up funnelling through shady resellers.
But yeah the police are not going to go get your iPhone back for you.
... unless your country is the US, in which case, yeah, true.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/nypd-misled-public-about-response...
https://www.texasobserver.org/activist-and-rape-survivor-lav...
It's getting a bit better, but it's still a problem:
https://www.nycsouthpaw.com/p/texas-still-has-thousands-of-u...
Not to mention the fact that there's a reminder of this setting every time you turn your phone off, which can be tapped to disable this behavior.
Who do you think you're even talking to on here?
PS: I like phones whose batteries are removable, currently use a Nokia Android with a removable one. One advantage is that when the phone drops down, it disintegrates, frame from battery, decreasing the overall impact on the phone.
I remember using a low-energy bluetooth scanner and noticing a strange mac that shouldn't have been present. I really wanted to know wtf was broadcasting it. I searched and searched looking in stupid places. Eventually I settled down and began thinking clearly and looked at my speaker. Yeah, it was as off as the power button could make it, though still on. A good toss across the multi-acre yard and the signal faded accordingly.
But if you're one of those few people who does turn the phone off, it says right there, and you can tap on it to shut down to unfindable state this time instead.
Note that it requires a passcode to disable, which is key to this feature. If someone steals your phone it will remain findable unless they open it up and pull the battery.
Sometimes turning it off and on again is the only way to get wi-fi syncing to work.
> If someone steals your phone it will remain findable unless they open it up and pull the battery.
Or drop the phone into a faraday bag?
It does not. iPhones 11 or newer.
“Participating in the Find My network let’s you locate your phone even when it’s offline”
It don’t it says anything about what happens if your phone is off.
The power reserve for this only lasts a few hours, but if you don't want that feature you can turn it off.
then turn it off? most people will want this, and for those who don't it's easy to turn off.
It literally isn't spying on you, it's allow you to find your after you've lost it.
almost no mobile device has a feature that is 'literally spying on you'.
the problem is when the devices have so many features that they can be easily turned into a consummate spy device by any nearby paying agency.
in other words : no mobile device is spying on you, but the people who control them definitely do, and they're often willing to sell the rights to do so to groups that are poorly vetted -- using a device with less capabilities necessarily gives the controlling party less options by which to gather data for whatever reasons they may be compelled to do so.
so.. the phone, lacking sovereignty , does not spy on you; but it's a big leaky gps/imu-enabled microphone camera that sits in your pocket or purse all day, and the list of groups with access to that leaky data-pipe increases every day with little concern and little reform regarding data retention policies and ownership rights.
Either way I don't want it spying on me.
A cell provider can triangulate any phone connected to its network.
The other way to be aware of by which websites do get location though is from GeoIP.
hmmm maybe because a monopolistic firm is repurposing the term 'power off'?
It's a negative change that I didn't know about and yes, it is weird/wrong.
Interesting how different people have different desires.
I went to next screen it doesn’t even say it there.
Then I clicked on “About Find My & Privacy..” it opened a huge T&C kinda thing text screen and I read until 3-4 paragraphs. It doesn’t mention it there either.
So I think it’s a problem and Apple is anything but clear/straightforward about it.
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That being said, if it were off and lost, this feature would be amazing. Apple is very transparent about it and also allows you to disable it as far as I remember.
The OP has a follow up tweet that iOS 15 made their phone hot during charging. Kind of feels like they might just not be having a good time with their new iPhone or is trying a little too hard to capture some Apple outrage attention. There are better things in the ecosystem to complain about in my opinion but to each their own.
From my POV (a non-Apple user) they have not changed, they have always been pretty anti-consumer. But even I can see that most of these stories have a clear agenda and are exaggerated to capture the current anti-Apple outrage sentiment. That kind of discussion doesn't do anyone any favours.
Except* for Comcast. FUCK Comcast.
* And also EA.
We always have an article about Facebook and Google when something bad or interesting is happening and I thionk this article qualifies because from the comments it is clear that the majority of people if asked "if the iPhone is powerd off if it really off? " would have said Yes, because we are used to power off to mean off and sleep like state to be labeled different.
They might be anti-you as a consumer, but I for one very much like this feature and feel that Apple was more transparent than they needed to be in this case, so they are certainly not anti-consumer to me (a consumer).
Other scandals like Samsung disabling the cameras when unlocking the boot loader go practically unnoticed. Almost everything said about Apple is true and I don't dispute that, but people seem to believe that Apple is the only one using questionable labor, gluing in batteries, or applying software restrictions when it's basically industry standard right now.
As someone with little general interest in the smartphone market, the digs seem to be pretty widespread nowadays. Samsung did indeed take flack for disabling the camera. Complains about the Play Store and Google anticompetitive behaviors are common and Apple is often in the press due to their high profile legal battle with Epic.
Yet, the recent moves: Snitch Software that works against the user with a worldwide localization network + no care about security at all.
I mean after Pegasus hit the news, Apple announced their picture scanning initiative. They didn't acknowledge or try to fix their horrible bounty program (compared to Microsoft and Google) and waited for a non-profit (awesome Citizen Lab) to find and fix their bug ... (a 0 click in iMessage)
That's not industry standard for me.
All OEMs have had hardware issues or scandals but they are all quickly forgotten while any fault on an iPhone becomes memorialized forever. They were all real faults but they weren't ever any worse than the rest, only more news worthy.
There are an endless
Exactly the vibe I got.
I honestly didn't know this until I just googled it. Apparently what I've been doing (vol+, vol-, sleep/power) is the 'hard reset'.
It definitely was simpler/more discoverable back before they got rid of the home button, since the lock/unlock button wasn't pulling double duty as the Siri launcher. "Hold the button longer to shut down harder" is how computers have worked since forever.
I turned mine off on a 6.5 hour flight when I wanted to ensure I'd have battery later and knew I wasn't going to use it for entertainment in-flight. That's really the only time I've turned my phone off in the past few years.
Because of that, I haven't switched off a phone in years (just for swapping Sim cards), airplane mode was always sufficient.
If people are worried about being tracked maybe they should carry around a device that is always broadcasting radio signals to third party towers.
As in apple cannot find your phone, it requires your credentials which iirc includes iCloud account and device unlock code.
It’s not so far fetched.
I’ll also mention that Ćhina will find this new feature very helpful and are no doubt grateful.
When you turn your phone off there is a message that states:
iPhone Findable After Power Off >
iPhone Remains Findable After Power Off
Find my helps you locate this iPhone when it is lost or stolen, even after power off
The location is visible in Find My on your other devices and to people in Family Sharing you share location with.
You can temporarily turn off Find My network and it will resume when this iPhone is turned on again
[OK] [Temporarily Turn Off Finding]
If it's off, you won't get the disclaimer, because it's not active.
Opportunistic ones likely won't have such a thing. My wife's phone was once stolen by someone at a hospital lab... after they'd checked in their kid. It was a fairly easy job for the cops to track that down.
The likelihood of the local PD deploying resources to recover your $xxx device is extremely low (non-existent), so will you chase down your thief and confront that stranger? Do you have a weapon that you're prepared to use if the bad guy threatens you with one?
All you have gained is the illusion of safety, while more data is siphoned off your device, even while it is off.
A more reasonable, good-faith understanding would also account for people who don't want to be tracked. I keep GPS and any location tracking on with all my devices because I don't want them to have any more data on me than I can avoid.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...
1. To preserve a low battery or because the battery has died.
2. To fully disable the device.
(1) is by far the most common of the two. In that case, once it's charging then turning back on automatically is the desired behavior. In the case of (2), if you have a strong motivation (avoiding detection, for instance) then you'd presumably have done a bit of research or noticed that this happens and make deliberate choices around how you use and charge the device.
It’s a toggle in Settings to turn off this functionality for those who want the surface area reduction, or an RF shielded bag if you don’t trust the toggle ;)
It's a useless feature against theft if it can just be turned off the thief.
If your threat model includes nation state actors, then you should probably be putting electronics in faraday bags if you don’t want to be tracked. For everyone else, the design of the Find My network provides significant protection against misuse.
They passing laws where they can run up in your own home
Cameras on your laptop, TV and your iPhone
The battery don't come out, that means it's always on”
- B.o.B., “Paper Route”, 2013
One might call him a conspiracy theory rapper. He once got in a Twitter feud with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether the earth was flat.
That is if you trust Apple to design and implement everything correctly.
It is best to treat electronics as always on and always recording and transmitting everything.
I get it because it's saved me once or twice. Nothing serious just reminders for various things. Overall net helpful from my view.
Edit: Just tested it. Sadly it still doesn't work. iOS 15 on an iPhone SE (2016).
I don’t understand why the “silent” switch doesn’t mean “completely silent”.
The old BlackBerries allows you to "turn off" the device and have the alarm wake you up. It basically drops into a low power mode.
It was easy to make a phone dead. You yanked out the batteries.
Pretty much anything with a clock that doesn't need resetting every time you turn it on can do this. An RTC chip is just a super low-power counter, and it costs almost nothing to toss in a wake-time comparator, so all of them do. When you set the wake-time alarm the host CPU really does power down 100% -- right after it sets the RTC chip's wake-time registers.
This is a long, long, long way from a microcontroller. It's not Turing-complete and has only a few dozen bits of storage for the counter. They're also manufactured on incredibly ancient fabrication processes (like 350nm until very recently) for lowest possible leakage.
I never used it, but remember it from BIOS settings.
I was having a discussion yesterday about a stolen MacBook Pro. We sent a wipe command and security was concerned that the command never arrived. I explained that it's extremely unlikely to ever arrive because it means the thief is either pretty dumb (connecting the device to a wired ethernet which gives him no benefit while it's locked) or extremely smart (managing to crack the password) but incredibly dumb at the same time (connecting to WiFi after logging in). Because we disable the guest login which Apple uses as "bait" for lost Macs.
Also, all of this applies only if the Mac was sleeping at boot time, otherwise FileVault blocks it from even booting up at all. Meaning no comms to us in any scenario.
However, this AirTag functionality would be amazing for Mac. We could send a wipe command to it even when it's off. The thief could obviously block it with a metal-lined bag but it would move the scenario to something where the thief actively has to do something to make the wipe work, to something where they actively have to do something to prevent the wipe from working.
So, as an enterprise device manager I love this.
However I'm a big privacy advocate as well, and in that scope it's pretty terrible, obviously. However, if it can be switched off (and ideally defaults to off) I'm fine with it.
I think nobody steals smartphones anymore for the smartphone itself. Mainly because they are either getting locked or are easily tracked. That is poor business.
What is happening in practice is thieves take sim card out of the phone and try to use it to steal from the owner as much as possible. Log in to bank account, reset passwords on social accounts and ransom money, etc.
I have an iPhone without a SIM card that I use as a test device and it happen that yesterday I left it in my backpack, together with an AirTag in the car. Shortly after I walked off, I got the AirTag notification as expected(the left behind notification). What I did not expect though, was to see the test iPhone also having an up to date location in the Find My app. That iPhone has no network connection, so I assumed that somehow it must have connected to my daily iPhone's hot spot.
And today, I learn that iPhones are capable of sending location even when turned off. So I checked the Find My setting, it's right there on iOS 14.4.2 on iPhone 7.
It's pretty cool, very aggressive tracking. Maybe we need clothes with faraday cage pockets for occasions when we don't like to be tracked.
The new feature is iPhones being able to be pinged while the power is off. This is indeed an iOS 15 only feature, and also an iPhone 11+ feature, so it is certainly not available on your iPhone 7 running iOS 14.
I like to have my phone findable after power off, but I am still not sure whether I want my phone to report other devices.
For instance, if I toss an AirTag into my neighbor's yard, I can get some idea on when they leave/return back to the house by monitoring the AirTag's update timestamps. I can later use this data to build their activity patterns and whatnot. I understand that Apple has some mechanism to mitigate this, like "reporting stranger's airtags in frequent accessed locations", but unless it is proven to be reliable, I can't trust it.
- Public transit and digital IDs. It sucks when phone dies and you can’t get out of a station or show your driver’s license.
- Power management. Power buttons on modern phones are digitally controlled by a microcontroller because actually switching main power by those buttons can glitch the phone.
- Firmware updates. Phone has to be able to handle USB connection to accept new firmware.
- (probably more)
It’s nothing new. Just that it does wireless too now.
For transit passes and IDs, there need to be non-phone-based ways of handling that issue. It's equally possible to lose / have your phone stolen. Talk to the station agent, or have the police look up your license by name / address.
There's no need for a continuously-running microcontroller to read the power button. It's perfectly possible to have the power button feed power directly from the battery to a bootstrap power management IC, which then takes over supplying power to the main processor.
USB connections supply power, so it's easy to implement having the presence of power on the USB port boot the phone.
It’s interesting, here in the U.K. you have a legal obligation to present a valid ticket upon demand for any train you travel on. Failure to do so for any reason (including my phone died, or I dropped the ticket) is a criminal offence (and I mean criminal, not civil) punishable by a prison sentence.
Some ticket conductors at the end of a long shift hearing endless excuses about why someone doesn’t have a valid ticket really aren’t interested in negotiating. They’re quite happy to enforce the law, and make your life a living hell in the process.
Personally I much prefer it if the transit pass on my phone keeps working after it dies. The alternative is very… inconvenient.
a) spend 15 minutes writing up a ticket, and possibly waiting for the police to arrive before handing you over to them
b) take you to the back office and let you sit for 5 minutes while your phone charges
Nobody is going to send you to prison for the first offence of not having a ticket (a physical ticket could be lost or damaged to a point where it is unreadable too). They would probably issue a fine, but you could appeal that. Buying a digital ticket you'd have a digital paper trail showing you bought it - which you wouldn't if you bought a paper ticket.
Also the easy fix for such an issue is to just poweroff the phone when it has ~5% of the phone power left which most phones already do. Instead of broadcasting its location, transit ID all the time it could just do it when you hold the power button down or something... it would last longer anyway.
Yeah there's no way I'm using my phone for this stuff even if I had that option. I don't trust batteries, wireless networks and modern software enough. I do use Google Pay, but I always have the physical card just in case.
p.s. I want to visit Japan someday
For a while now to steal a phone you needed a fence. The fence will just give you a metallised bag and you'll put the phone in it. It's not really more complicated than turning off the phone as thieves already do.
As for the software features, they've always been and will always be bypassable. People figure out how to defeat iCloud Lock, how to change ESN/IMEI/IMSI already. It's easily a 30 million dollar market, people will continue to figure it out.
it's another hassel for thieves which imho is a good thing. Might as well argue "why lock you door when all someone needs is a bump key!"
The only difference is now instead of turning off the phones they'll put it in a metallized plastic bag.
Also huh you finally gave me a reason why apple may be locking its hardware components now.
No apps related to the largest current event that challenge the dominant narratives are alllwrd in the App Store at all.
> In other news I updated my phone to iOS 15 and put it down to charge last night. When I woke up it was hot, and my battery has gone from 100% to 15% since 7:30am. I gotta get off this ecosystem.
I mean, if you have tends of thousands of photos you accumulated over the years. I bet scan of these against CP lib will take some time and battery.
You are partially right though, in that the likely explanation for this extra power consumption is re-indexing content / rebuilding local neural networks, which use a lot of power (for a day or so, and then they're finished).
So rather than scanning your photos for CP, more likely it's scanning your photos for text or similar as part of the new Live Text feature.
"You iPhone continues to report its location to Apple when it is powered off" or something
seems software has gone back to extremely hostile user-facing strings, after about a decade of "oopsie doopsie our system had a crashie"
This statement wouldn’t be true. The iPhone broadcasts crypto keys over Bluetooth, which other I devices use to encrypt the detected location and upload to Apple.
But the only thing capable of decrypting those encrypted payloads is other devices attached to the same iCloud Keychain.
So Apple has no idea where your phone is, and there’s also no guarantee that a location will ever be uploaded.
The only person who can find your "findable" device is you.
The find my network is anonymous - even apple cannot find an arbitrary device on it. A malicious agent with a full compromise of apple's networks cannot find your device. Apple cannot be compelled to provide the information because again, apple does not have the ability to.
The TLDR: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/find-my/
The actual technical details: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
[1] https://beebom.com/how-find-lost-iphone-turned-off-erased/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/otcn02/iphone_rema...
All of the iPhone “off” features, like express transit cards and find my use dedicated low power hardware that seems to be capable of running the feature without an active CPU telling it what to do.
Does "airplane mode" still shut off all transmitters?