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.
slide to power off, Emergency SOS, Cancel
That's it. Nothing appears after I turn it off either.
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.
It might actually be a good thing to try, and to step back without a mobile phone and unclutter our current model of communication and coordination. It would likely involve more commitments (e.g. "we said that we would meet at that space and time") and less distraction.
You can use your phone while traveling 1-2 hours to a big city, and then turn it off.
Imagine a case where evidence puts you near a protest or crime scene while your phone is home. That’s coincidence, but if your phone also was home only at the three days three similar events happened, it becomes circumstantial evidence.
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.
To be serious though: there's a lack of acknowledgement of the functional benefits of tracking by those advocating for control and privacy in this particular instance. The fact is as long as Apple's closed walled-garden is offering actual value to users (FindMyPhone works, and works well, for the common use-case most "consumers" experience day-to-day), while open alternatives are actively sticking their head in the sand around features like this, then closed solutions will prevail.
What's needed is proper discourse on the challenges of e.g. providing practical asset management features that bad actors cannot easily overcome, while at the same time ensuring full user control over their own device and privacy. This is a real world challenge without easy answers: "just turn it all off all the time" is an easy answer, and a cop-out.
If we want to provide quality solutions to e.g. activists, those solutions need to be mature and practical.
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.
I believe I was thinking of my older phone. Tapping the home button, perhaps even the volume buttons, would turn it back on. On my Xs, I have to hold down the power button for a few seconds before it would turn on. I find this a bit more reliable if I want my phone to be off for awhile.
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.