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Comment by theendisney2 | Hacker News Reader

In my job I regularly wonder how to get a found phone laptop or notebook back to their owner. The notebook is the easiest. The apple laptop the most stupid. I have the locked laptop i have my iphone you would think, with the closed eco-system, there to be some magic ritual i can perform for the laptop to register on the owners "find my device"???? Or at least let me type a number for them to call?

Sometimes, (if i charge the phone) eventually contacts real names appear on the home screen. This seems just the information one shouldn't be sharing?

It is really odd how garbage the tech is here.

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On my Android phone, the homescreen can have a short message, I changed it to "If found, call {wife's phone number}"

I know, great in theory but i havent seen one where it was configured. You can also configure a phone number to call. No one apparently does that.

The solution needs to not require any configuration.

You can call your own phone of course but then i have to keep it charged. If it dies the sim locks.

Whenever I go to big concerts or gatherings, I set my lock screen to a screenshot of a WhatsApp story (that I never publish) saying something like that.

Do they usually have guest account access disabled, and would that help if enabled? I once saw a theory that guest account access can help because it grants the third party the ability to connect it to any WiFi network, allowing it to “phone home”

On iPhones, there is the ability to get the medical id (their name and emergency contact) from the Lock Screen too, if people set that up. I set my notifications privacy setting to show preview only when unlocked, so that it won’t show names of my contacts or one-time PIN codes texted to me

People Who forget their phone are perhaps more likely to not configure anything.

I can think of a number of ways to improve the finders experience. Give the provider something to configure. Say a dedicated helpdesk number where I report finding your phone and you can report losing it. Perhaps with a pin matched to the phone.

Say the finder manages to unlock it (0000) they can create a facinating phone bill. If reported as lost the provider can at least cap the bill at something more usual until your id is fully validated.

Could create an app for registered lost and found spots. Then can do all kinds of magic.

Having 1000$ bricks sitting on shelves looks kinda..dumb?

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