Data theft and gadget theft are two things that the electronic guru often worry about. Getting your prized gadget stolen is hard enough. Getting your identy manhandled is no walk in the park either. In OS 3.0, Apple introduced a nifty “Find My iPhone” feature that would allow iPhone users to track and find their lost or stolen iPhone through Mobile Me. Super! However, Apple managed to overlook one small detail. Well, a few actually. The new Find My iPhone feature can be circumvented rather easily, and even without an intelligent thief. Those looking to put the stops on the iPhone tracking feature have several ways to go about it…

• They can yank the SIM card out.

• Delete the Mobile Me email account

• Restore iPhone software

• And finally, you can simply disable the Find My iPhone feature in the settings app

Clearly this isn’t good and pretty much renders the recovery feature useless, if it is stolen that is. Worse still, the recovery tool assumes that Mobile Me and Push email are both activated, and one of the staples of the Find My iPhone recovery tool is the ability to send the would be thief an email stating your intentions to make his life suck. If you have Mobile Me disabled, push turned off, and/or a passcode, that message will never reach the adversary as he either won’t check your email to let Mobile Me sync, or he simply can’t access your device. Which, goes back to the problems mentioned above.

Heck, forgetting the thief, the same problem can occur even for a good samaritan. With push turned off and a passcode in use will make it virtually impossible for them to recover the needed message or information to return the device to the rightful owner — hardly the effect I assume Apple wanted.

While nothing is perfect the first time through and many people simply forget, leaving these gaping holes in a staple feature is rather surprising. Using common sense, it isn’t hard to see Apple patching these holes in a not too distant update.

Have you tested the new feature yet? Have you had your device stolen or lost and experienced anything theorized above? It’s ok, we don’t bite.

Source: Crave, Image Source