![]() It happened to Wayne Dobson, who in 2013 got so fed up with people coming to his Las Vegas house looking for their lost phones that he eventually put a sign on his front lawn saying: NO LOST CELLPHONES!! That’s right – find-my-phone features can provide the approximate location, but some quirks in how they use geolocation can make them inaccurate enough to cause some confusing and unfortunate incidents.įind-my-phone features rely on GPS signals from the device, but if GPS isn’t available, the tracker software will use nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi signals, or IP addresses to locate the device.īut imprecision, and perhaps inaccuracies, in the data these phone tracking services are using can lead to mix-ups which, while rare, happen from time to time. They will also show you the (approximate) location of your lost device – so long as your phone is still on. These features allow you to log into your Apple iCloud or Google account to lock or remotely wipe your device if your phone is lost or stolen. The people who come knocking at Lee and Saba’s house are using anti-theft phone tracking features including Find My iPhone for iOS.įind My iPhone, and a similar feature called Device Manager for Android devices, have been pretty successful at deterring smartphone theft. Lee and Saba are not serial phone thieves, so what’s going on here? ![]() If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far. My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this. The couple have been fortunate, so far, to avoid anything more serious than awkward conversations and a police search of their home, but Saba is worried things could go badly, as he told Fusion: One time it was the police, who were searching for a missing person by tracing her phone, which led them to the couple’s home. It happens quite a bit: about 12 times in the past year, people have showed up at Lee and Saba’s home asking for their lost/stolen devices, sometimes belligerently, because of a quirk in the phone tracking technology in recent versions of iPhone and Android. People searching for their lost and stolen smartphones in the vicinity of Atlanta, Georgia, keep turning up at the home of Christina Lee and Michael Saba.
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