“Starting with iOS 7, deleting an iCloud account or restoring a device requires Find My iPhone to be disabled,” Mike Beasley reports for 9to5Mac. “Find My iPhone, in turn, requires the user to enter the password for the Apple ID attached to the iCloud account. This system ensures that phone thieves can’t remove the account and avoid being tracked through the Find My iPhone website.”
“Unfortunately, there’s a pretty easy way to bypass this requirement,” Beasley reports. “To do so, you first need to tap both “delete account” and the switch to disable Find My iPhone at the same time in the iCloud settings panel. That’s actually the hardest part of the entire process.”
Read more in the full article here.
Crap. My guess is that fix will be out by Monday. Someone is making one of those Hitler videos, only it’s Tim Cook being told about this.
It is likely possible, but not something the average purse/phone snatcher would easily do. I erred out on entering my pass code on my iPad. Could not do an reset because Find my iPad was activated. With some on line research, I managed to do a reinstall from iTunes. It did however require my Apple password, as I recall.
Wss a challenge. If stolen phones are locked and he theft is reported, I would hope carriers check the stolen phone database before activating a stolen phone. Not much hope if the phones are exported however.
Must be Microsoft’s, Google’s or Samsung’s fault! 🙂
Don’t forget W.
Well, thanks for telling the world this little trick, that I’m pretty sure nobody would find by accident, but now any thieving pikey can utilise.
Hum, utilise, or utilize. On second thought I must have missed the memo that states, ” we will now utilize utilize rather than utilize use.” Check the meaning and usage of utilize, it may surprise you. The word, use, is much more preferable.
There aren’t any goddamned memos about word usage. It’s regional and cultural, and pros have adapted to that. So should you.
If you’re the type of person that doesn’t have a passcode already set, the chances you’re worried about any of this is fairly slim.
I agree. This only works if the thief gets use of your iOS device in an unlocked state. So, don’t hand your device to a potential thief.
If a thief has your device in an unlocked state, he may want to steal your personal data before he wipes it for resale.
I found that if you go into General/Restrictions and activate password controls for yourself (i.e., set parental control for yourself), then set Location Services to not allow changes, it will will gray out the option with the hack to turn off Find My iPhone.
READ the ENTIRE article. Fodder for the ignoramus on yesterdays news. NeXT.
I could not reproduce this on my iPod touch. They’ve also done nothing to prove that the iPhone would not be activation locked after a restore. As they’re not sending Apple a password to disable Find my iPhone, this would most like cause this iPhone to still show as activation lock on Apple’s end to prevent it from activating.
As the article itself points out, set a passcode.
Secondly, go to Settings->General->Restrictions and don’t allow changes. This will help protect you if someone gets your iPhone during the time-out period of the passcode or if they steal your iPhone after seeing you enter your passcode. Just make sure to set a different passcode for your restrictions.
Wow! Who would have thought that having no passcode on your iPhone would allow thieves access to your settings?