Ever tracked your lost cell phone down with a tracking app?

That is dangerous. A man was killed tracking his phone. In Canada.

The SO gave his father and iPod years ago and later an iPad. When his dad started developing dementia and constantly misplacing items, we loaded the tracking feature on on my iPad. One time, he was staying with us, and between the previous evening and the next morning, the iPod was missing.

Dad never left the house. Since his brother and SIL had been there the night before, we checked with them to see if they had seen it, used the tracking app to no avail, and then started meticulously checking everywhere in the house. This was several years ago, and we still do the occasional search including the tracker app.

My guess is that it was either switched off or the battery was dead when it went MIA. Since he is known to squirrel items away at night after a glass of wine or two, it’s likely that it will still turn up in a pocket or in some nook that escaped our search.

In order to make sure the app worked, we tested it with his iPad, which we also set up to track. If I recall correctly, it did. Otherwise, I would have deleted the app.

@talljasperman was he tricked into going there and then murdeted?

My ex misplaced her phone. My daughter went over to her house, used “Find My iPhone”, and found it under the driver’s seat of the car.

No the theif was a gang member and the man walked in a dangerous situation and was shot.

My exboyfriend tracked his iPad to the person who took it. It was the next day, he had left it in a restaurant.

It does seem dangerous to me. Why not let a cop retrieve it? I wonder if they would bother to help.

I used Find My Phone once. I fell asleep and my phone was on the bed. I had managed to knock it into a box next to my bed that had packing peanuts in it. Before I noticed the phone was missing I took out the recycling.

I got very lucky. The place where we put recycling was about 50 meters from my room so I knew it wasn’t in my room or the house.

No. But then, I have never lost my phone.

A couple of years ago, on a very cold New Year’s day, a couple of guys knocked on my front door. One told me that his iPhone had been stolen and that Find My iPhone led them to my address. There was obviously a lot of tension in the situation, so I put on my most conciliatory demeanor and assured them that I had nothing to do with it.

Our house is on a corner, and I speculated that the thieves may have discovered that the phone was disabled and, not wanting to be tracked, had ditched it somewhere on our lot. I bundled up and went out to help them comb the bushes for the phone. I even emptied the public garbage can on the corner piece by piece to see if it had been tossed in there. After an hour of searching we never found it.

They thanked me before leaving, but I’m not sure they were ever convinced that I wasn’t lying.