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How to Make Your Lost Phone Findable

David Pogue, 9/08/2012 (The New York Times)

Last week, I lost my iPhone on a train. I used Apple’s Find My iPhone feature to track it to a house in suburban Maryland, and the local police were able to return it to me. Because I’d tweeted about these developments, the quest for the phone became, much to my surprise, an Internet-wide, minute-by-minute real-life thriller. (You can read the whole story here.)

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Several readers wrote to ask how to set up their own phones to be findable. As you’d guess, given last week’s experience, I have some strong feelings about the importance of setting up Find My iPhone or the equivalent on Android phones.

First, though, some caveats.

These phone-tracking systems work only if your lost phone is turned on and online; if its battery is dead or it’s powered off, it can’t see the Internet and can’t show you its location.

Furthermore, professionals know about Find my iPhone. As soon as they steal a phone, they connect it to a computer running the iTunes program and wipe it, so that Find My iPhone won’t work anymore.

All right — duly warned? Here’s how you set things up. iPhone first.

First, you need a free iCloud account; sign up at www.icloud.com. You’ll provide your e-mail address and a password that you make up.

Now, on the iPhone or iPad, open Settings. Tap iCloud. Scroll down and turn on Find My iPhone. When the phone asks if you’re sure, tap Allow.

While you’re at it, you might consider tapping Settings (top left corner) to back out to the main Settings screen; then tap General, tap Passcode Lock and give your phone or tablet a password.

I was very glad I had protected my phone this way when it got lost; the password meant the thief couldn’t actually use the phone or access my e-mail, photos and so on.

All right. Now suppose the worst has come to pass. Your phone is gone.

Go to any computer and log into icloud.com. (Or use the Find My iPhone app on another iPhone or iPad.) There, when you click Find My iPhone, you’ll see the location of your phone on a map. You can switch to satellite-photo view to see the actual building or land.

If the phone is offline, a check box lets you request an e-mail alert if the phone ever pops back online. That’s precisely how I found my own phone. The thief turned it off on a Monday, so I couldn’t use Find My iPhone. On Thursday, an e-mail message let me know it had been turned back on, and showed me where it was.

Often, the phone is somewhere in your car or your house. If that’s the case, you can make it ping loudly for two minutes, even if it the ringer was on Mute, and even if the phone is asleep.

You can also make a message pop up on the screen; if you left the phone in a taxi or a meeting room, for example, you can offer a reward this way, or transmit your phone number. If a well-meaning person finds your phone, you might get it back.

If you didn’t protect the phone with a password, you can either click Lock (to password-protect the phone by remote control) or, if you’re really concerned, click Remote Wipe. That’s a means of erasing the phone by remote control. So the bad guy gets away with your phone, but your e-mail, photos and other digital treasures remain private. Of course, at that point, you can no longer find the phone or send messages to it using Find My iPhone.

If you have an Android phone, you have to visit Google Play, the new name for the Android app store, and download an app in advance. One great, free option is Find My Droid. Despite the name, it works on any recent Android phone.

If your phone gets lost, you text a password to the phone to activate the app. Suddenly your ringer turns on at maximum volume and rings for 30 seconds. You can send a different code to request a link to the phone’s location; you get coordinates and a link to a Google map. The Remote Wipe feature requires the Pro version, $4.

Another app, Plan B, lets you see where your Android phone is, in much the same way, but you can download it after the phone’s gone missing. That’s right; you can remotely download it. When you do, the app self-opens and sends the phone’s location to your registered Gmail address.

These apps are amazing; they even out the odds of recovery when your phone has gone missing. A couple of readers even felt sorry for the person who took my phone, maintaining that Find My iPhone rendered him hopelessly outmatched, and asserting that it was an invasion of his privacy for me to be able to see where he took my phone.

Still, many readers shared Find My iPhone failure tales. The phone may not be turned on. The bad guy may be smart enough to erase it. And there may be no way of recovering the phone, even if you know where it is. Even if you provide the phone’s location, some police departments will help you get it back, and others won’t.

These problems could be overcome. Police help recover jewelry, cars and other stolen goods — why not expensive cellphones?

And the cellphone carriers know where our phones are at all times, even when the phone has been erased; they can track the phone’s serial number. At the moment, however, the Verizons and AT&T’s of the world have no interest in using that information to help you recover your lost phone. Why should they? If it’s lost, you’ll buy another one.

In other words, fewer phones will be stolen or lost, and more will be recovered, if society comes to its senses. But for that to happen, we need more than Find My iPhone; we need Find My Common Sense.