Texas man claims 'Find My' glitch makes people think he stole their phones | Hacker News Reader

Texas man claims 'Find My' glitch makes people think he stole their phones

abcnews.go.com

43 pointstoss117 comments

I know what this guy is going through.

My house (actually just out in front) is some sort of default location for Find My in my small town, so the Sheriff Dept used to show up on occasion looking for an iPad or an iPhone — occasionally with really angry victims standing in the background.

Yes, I have a bunch of iPads in my house. No, none of them are yours.

If any Apple people are listening, I’d love to get this default location moved about 30 feet to the southwest.

And it's not like this is some unexpected side effect. Many years ago, there was already a story about people showing up at some farm in Kansas that happened to be what geolocation services considered the center of the US, and therefore the default location of any device of which they only knew it was in the US.

Geolocation services should not give specific coordinates if they don't know where something is. Give a range that makes clear how uncertain the location is. And these sort of "Find My" services need to make clear that the location they're giving is probably not the location where your device is.

It's basically making false accusations, and that can be incredibly dangerous.

> Give a range that makes clear how uncertain the location is.

In fairness to Find My, it tries to do this already. A light blue circle surrounding the item shows the estimated precision of the location. I suspect there are people that don't interpret it that way and instead just go to where the icon in the centre of the circle is.

Umm, that blue circle could easily be interpreted as a larger circle display to make the point-location easier to see. There's nothing visible that would indicate otherwise.

Especially in the context of a "Find My Thing" app., when users are already in an anxious state when opening it.

The actual accuracy/uncertainty MUST be displayed.

"Point X with uncertainty of 10 meters" vs. "Within 3km of Cell Tower Y" vs. "Point X somewhere in Texas" are all way the hell different.

Those differences must be emphasized at first-order priority in the UI to any user of sub-average intelligence who is already in a stressed state of mind.

This is the most basic human factors engineering - recognize what your user is attempting to do, how they are attempting to do it and under what conditions (e.g., stressed, time pressure, etc.), then design to minimize their workload to actually achieve their goal.

"But I displayed the data!" is not enough. This is a hard fail.

I would be willing to bet that this is something to do with a nearby Wi-Fi network that either has a duplicate BSSID to some other network, or has at some point been physically moved, confusing the Wi-Fi geolocation of nearby devices.

Countdown until someone brings a gun to this guy's house to "get their phone back".

There was a great episode of Reply All about this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/n8hodm

The perfect cover story for someone who steals hundreds of phones from people!

Isn’t this one of those situations where, if they can’t find or resolve the IP to a geo location they place it at a random place, usually in the middle of the ocean? I recall there being more issues like this with different companies.

"Null Island" is a ocean buoy at zero-latitude/zero-longitude in the Gulf of Guinea off the west cost of Africa.

This an odd case of dereferencing a NULL Pointer. Some Apps default to this valid physical location (It has become a tourist destination for the brave or foolish) leading to strange directions and distance calculations.

If need to have a default make sure it is not a valid location such as using +91 or -181 (out of range values).

Facebook used to (still does?) have an easter egg on their map depicting NULL island: https://twitter.com/chris_whong/status/1359126193413488645

If you look closely, it strongly resembles another island: https://www.trueachievements.com/game/Myst/walkthrough/3

If I ever make something similar, I'll place the default location over a police station to avoid these situations

Cue the stories of, the police stole my whatever8 and now they won't give it back. I contacted a lawyer but they won't help, the entire system is corrupt.

Instead, make the default location either the center of the Pentagon, the White House or for fun, the middle of the reflecting pool in DC. Or more fun the IRS HQ or NSA HQ.

Preferably, just make absolutely sure that there is no "default location" under any circumstances. Make invalid states unrepresentable.

Maybe it's his neighbor.

Their photo is badly reacted (Not hard to OSINT without the street names, just makes it easier)

The real location probably is in a park, but it's marked as the last house near the park, this is not OP's house.

The text address it gives is OP's

Nothing existed 5 years ago in the locations.

Given that you'd guess it's a mis-match of data when it used to be a field and now it's houses and a park.

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