Apple’s Family Sharing allows people signed in to this group to choose to share their location with each other and their devices. This can be useful for parents: not only does it help them know where their stray child is if they haven’t boarded the school bus or are out and haven’t made contact, but it can also help recover lost material. (As my eldest child learned the inside out when he disabled Find My on a borrowed iPad and left it on the trip.)
If Find My is enabled, a device’s location is still tracked and available to the owner through Find My on other devices and through iCloud.com, as well as to members of the Family Sharing group if they have it allowed. (The Find My Network, which relies on the encrypted crowdsourcing of location signals broadcast by Find My items and transmitted by nearby Macs, iPhones and iPads owned by anyone, cannot be used through Family Sharing as it relies on end-to-end encryption with the owner’s devices.)
You may want your child to always leave Find My on. Disabling Find My requires the Apple ID password for the iCloud account used on the device. Without this password, your child (or someone else) cannot turn off Find My.
However, there are a few important conditions:
- Anyone with a device passcode can turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Cellular access, or all three. This prevents tracking. (If Bluetooth stays on, you’ll need to use a device signed into the same iCloud account, such as a child’s home computer, to track it.)
- Anyone with a trusted device signed into an iCloud account can reset Apple ID password without knowing the Apple ID password. This is a safety and security vulnerability revealed by the the wall street journal recently in connection with substance abuse, violent assault and even homicide. If the password changes, Apple sends an email to the associated account. If you monitor this email account, you will see this alert.
With an iPhone or iPad, there’s no way to prevent someone who has the password from changing network settings or resetting the Apple ID password. On a Mac, you can set up a standard user account, enable Locate on an administrator account, and use fast user switching to keep the administrator account logged in and active but unavailable to the regular user. (This column offers some tips on setting up fast user switching.)
This means that a child using a device probably wants to access the internet and is therefore unlikely to turn it off, meaning tracking will always remain active. And that’s a high bar for a kid to reset an Apple ID password and hope no one notices. Apple needs to revise its security policies to prevent device-based Apple ID password reset, which would eliminate the problem for parents as well.
If you want to check that Find My is enabled (a good idea to recover the device and lock it against use by thieves), look in these locations:
- iOS and iPadOS: Go to Settings > account name > iCloud > find my.
- macOS Monterey or earlier: Go to > System Preferences > iCloud Or Apple ID > iCloud and select find my.
- macOS Ventura: Go to > System Parameters > account name > iCloud > find my.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by igamesnews reader Nikki.
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