Find My Stuff

Mobile devices are exceedingly easy to lose. They’re compact, slip out of pockets, or are easy to misplace under a stack of magazines or in the seat-back pocket on a plane. Your mobile device is also a desirable item for thieves. It’s compact, it has a high retained value, and there’s a huge market for used models.

Because we can misplace our mobile items and they’re easy enough to be absconded with, I want to tell you how to use Apple’s Find My service available across nearly every kind of hardware Apple makes. You can protect your data when your device has disappeared, make it impossible for a thief to use your device, and find your device or other stuff you own whether it was lost or stolen.

Apple has two kinds of Find My services for hardware:

• Find My Device: Available in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS and via iCloud.com, Find My iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and Apple Watch rely on location information that can include satellite-based coordinates, cellular tower locations, and Wi-Fi base stations to pinpoint a location. It’s two-way: you can find your device and send commands to it, like playing a sound or erasing it. Find My also provides an activation lock, a theft deterrent that prevents easy reuse by anyone other than the owner. In Find My apps, this category appears as Devices. (The watchOS app is called Find Devices.)

• Find My network: The Find My network is a privacy-protecting crowdsourced system in which people participating allow their iPhone, iPad, or Mac to relay encrypted Bluetooth signals emitted by an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or Apple Watch, AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and certain Beats audio hardware, as well as Apple’s AirTags tracking items and other Find My network items that use Apple’s licensed technology. In Find My apps, this category appears as Items, except for audio devices, which always appear in a Devices tab or Find Devices app.

This books dig deeply into both systems. You’ll learn how to enable, disable, and control tracking, understand how to find missing hardware and trigger remote actions, and be aware of the potential of misuses of tracking technology—and how to guard against it.

Find My People

People are a bit more complicated than devices. We may want to keep our whereabouts completely private always or share them with certain other people at all times. We might want to go off the grid—or always be able to know approximately where our children are.

Look in the People tab in the native Find My apps for information about where you can find other people who have shared their locations with you.

Apple offers significant control over how and with whom you share your location and lets you change this at will. The Find My People service has the potential to aid unwanted tracking by abusive partners or family or by stalkers, and I explain the controls available to you and that you can help others configure for their safety.