“When buying a used Apple computer, make sure the previous owner has signed out of iCloud,” David Murphy reports for PC Magazine. “If not, he or she might be able to keep tabs on the old device.”
“Google product manager Brenden Mulligan found this out the hard way. As he writes in a Medium post, Mulligan sold an iMac on Craigslist three years ago,” Murphy reports. “But he still has access to the computer via Apple’s Find My iPhone feature because the person he sold the system to never actually tried to use iCloud.”
“Since the system was still registered to his iCloud account, Mulligan could have it play a sound at any point, lock down the computer entirely, or erase its contents—all powers you probably don’t want a system’s former owner to have,” Murphy reports. “That’s in addition to the aforementioned location tracking.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Selling or giving away a Mac? Check out Apple’s support document: What to do before you sell or give away your Mac.
The Google employee screwed up and didn’t follow protocol, so what else is new? And then a headline to make it sound like an Apple flaw, again what else is new?
Sounds more like the user after purchasing didn’t bother to ‘wipe’ the computer before he/she used it. As far as we know the new user has access to all the Google employee’s ‘deep’ settings also.
Could work the other way around too. The new owner has access to the previous owner’s iCloud account.
Before I sell my Macs, I wipe clean (7-pass formatting; call me paranoid) and re-install the OS. I give it to the new owner as I got it from Apple — unconfigured, waiting for customer’s personal info.
If I get a second-hand Mac from someone for permanent use, I don’t even look at how it is configured; I Option+boot the machine, select the maintenance partition to boot from, then wipe and re-install.
To have a product manager at Google not being aware of the need to do this before giving your Mac to a stranger is quite difficult to imagine.
Doesn’t sound like a very bright Google employee, if he can’t follow basic security protocol.
For all we know he may have intended it and depended on the new user not wiping the computer or using iCloud.
What possible reason would anyone on the planet have for doing that?
Maybe he wanted to spy on or know something about the person he sold it to.
Let’s keep at least roughly to the reality of the universe we inhabit.
Hey, you asked for a reason. 😀 My scenario is reasonably realistic.
I don’t think the person that sold it really thought the buyer would continue to use it as is.
No, that would have gotten him fired from Google.
They don’t want their employees competing with the company.
Good one! 😀
Well next time turn off the service and wipe it.
Remember back when you could easily take the HD out of a Mac laptop, Mini or Mac Pro and swap them out? Used to always swap out the HD and install a clean version of OS X before selling a Mac.
Maybe Apple should revert to that capability.