Texas Dad Says 'Find My iPhone' Glitch is Directing Angry Strangers to his Home...
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Texas Dad Says 'Find My iPhone' Glitch is Directing Angry Strangers to his Home
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An anonymous reader shares a report from the New York Post:
A supposed glitch in the popular "Find My iPhone" app has been directing random strangers to the home of an unsuspecting Texas dad at all hours of the day, falsely accusing him of stealing their electronic devices.
[Software engineer] Scott Schuster told the local news station KTRK that he's been visited by close to a dozen irate people over the past few years, telling him that their missing phone had last pinged at his address. "[I] had to wake up and go answer the door and explain to them that I didn't have their device, and people don't tend to believe you," the dad of two told the outlet.
The Texas resident tells KTRK that his biggest concern was "someone coming to the house potentially with a weapon."
And the same station reports that local sheriff Eric Fagan "said he was so shocked and concerned that he informed his patrol units and dispatchers, just in case anyone called about the address."
"Apple needs to do more about this," Fagan said. "Please come out and check on this. This is your expertise. Mine is criminal and keeping our public safe here in Fort Bend County." Fagan added that Apple doing nothing puts a family's safety in jeopardy. "I would ask them to come out and see what they can do. It should be taken seriously. You are putting innocent lives at risk," he said....
There have been other high-profile device pinging errors elsewhere in the country, with at least one that brought armored vehicles to a neighborhood. In 2021, body camera footage captured a Denver police SWAT team raiding the home of a 77-year-old woman in Colorado over a false ping on the app. Denver officers believed she had stolen guns connected to a car theft after tracking a stolen iPhone to her address using the Find My app. That woman later sued the lead detective.
ABC13 has tried contacting the software giant since Tuesday. Someone called back, so we know they are aware of the incident. Still, no one has said if they are going to fix the issue, or at the very least, look into the matter.
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So he can end up charged with murder too? Anyway, if Apple will not fix it, they will not pay for a gun either. If the feature does not work properly, they should disable it until it does. No excuses.
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It's Texas. If somebody angry and armed shows up at night and he shoots them, the police are going to give him advice on cleaning and disposal services, not arrest him.
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Unless you live in Blueville, otherwise known as Austin.
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Except every major city in Texas leans blue. A grand jury didn't indict Joe Horn for shooting two thieves robbing his neighbor's house in Houston.
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Defending your children against drunk and irate people trespassing on your property wouldn't be illegal in a blue state.
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Murdering people for knocking on your door wouldn't be legal in a blue state.
This situation wouldn't happen in a blue nation anyway. Government regulation of businesses would force Apple to fix a defect that clearly puts people in danger. And police would have sufficient oversight and/or be replaced by more appropriate personnel, so that citizens could trust them to handle these situations rather than go vigilante.
This whole story only exists because of backwards conservative ideals of unfettered Capi-
I enjoyed the bit in the summary that said "...with at least one that brought armored vehicles to a neighborhood." as if armoured vehicles driving around neighbourhoods is a normal thing to occur in a nation supposedly at peace.
Weird how they blame Apple for it too.
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At last, somebody is thinking about THE CHILDREN!
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It works fine for me and I use it a lot. This guy will have to bear the burden for a while.
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Of course because who doesn't want to die in a gunfight!/s
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We each steal a Crapple device and throw it over the wire fence at Crapple HQ. Make sure there are plenty of cameras and drones to catch the fun that follows.
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.. how many stalkers plant AirTags on their victims and then wind up at this guy's place.
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A lot. But it's not like this was never possible before "the invention of the AirTag". There have been many tiny tracking devices. Apple did not invest tracking devices, did not invent portable digital music players, did not invent the smartphone, etc. etc.
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by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:24PM (#63435658)
But Apple did invent "screw up locations when reporting a Find My Device request".
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Uh.. They didn't actually invent that either. "Maxmind" would return one kansas farm for any IP address that didn't have any valid location assigned to them.
The owners were visited by the local police, FBI, ambulances, and more regularly.
This sounds very similar.
https://splinternews.com/how-a... [splinternews.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Ocamms razor says this guy is criminal
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It isn't the first time a company has screwed up like that.
A few years back, a homeowner had a similar complaint about the most popular geolocation system at the time which tagged their home as the "somewhere in the United States" location, and had to sue to get it changed [washingtonpost.com]. (another version of the story [theguardian.com]) I'm pretty sure it was discussed a few times here on/. as well, but search isn't finding it.
The family was accused of everything from child porn to stolen vehicles to fraud to missing persons cases, doxx
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Looks like it isn't even the first time for Apple, sending people to the wrong address until a lawsuit forces them to fix it. [fortune.com]
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Without their gun laws work you can show up to somebody's house and shoot them dead and it's 50/50 whether stand your ground applies to you and get you off the hook. Often based entirely on whether the judge or jury likes you
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Wait, "stand your ground" applies to both the resident and visitor? That sounds like an interesting race condition.
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Yes, race is probably one of the conditions.
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In the end it resolves to in Texas if the two people are determined shoot each other to resolve things, then so be it.
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Because that always ends well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]-
They don't care about that though. So it's not in play motivation-wise
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Surely, if the "visitor" is one micron outside the boundaries of the property, then they are just a random person on the public highway, and it's "stand your ground" on both sides?
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"Stand your ground" generally means there is no duty to retreat from a threat. It doesn't give you license to use deadly force if you are not in what you believe to be actual threat of death or great bodily harm to you or someone else. It also doesn't necessarily matter if you are on your own property or not (depends on the State). In these 28 States it doesn't matter where you (legally) are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan
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IANAL, but I don't think "stand your ground" applies if you're trying to retrieve your stolen iThingy. Stand your ground laws generally have a clause requiring that (in layman's terms) you don't intentionally go looking for trouble.
Now if the homeowner blew away someone for behaving in a threatening manner, yeah, that'd be a textbook stand your ground defense.
The moral of the story is remote wipe/iCloud lock your iDevice and make peace with the fact that it's gone. Maybe Apple should start adding a discla
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Actually, it wouldn't be.;)
To be more accurate, it wouldn't be "textbook", because if they do the shooting from their home(and it can be any resident, not just the owner), it would be more accurately called "castle doctrine". Basically, that somebody's home is their castle, and that there is no valid retreat from your home/castle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Stand your ground is thus normally explicitly for outside your place of residence and/or work, expanding "castle doctrine" to anywhere you are pu
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That's not how Stand Your Ground laws work. Not anywhere in the U.S. If you go to someone's house and shoot them dead, you just murdered someone.
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The laws are very inconsistently enforced. One of the things folks have a really hard time comprehending is that the enforcement of laws in America is really slapdash. A well to do jock can smoke marijuana all they want but a poor black kid will do time for it. Some of that is that the jock can afford a lawyer and knows to not say anything to the cops while the poor black kid gets railroaded into signing a guilty plea after 16 hours of questioning.
But some of it is just plain laws being selectively enfo
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Several years ago a mother and daughter showed up at our house saying her daughterâ(TM)s phone was in our house. One of our teenagers was home with younger siblings. The mother demanded that our home be opened. Our teenager called the police. The mother showed her screen to the officer and the officer explained locations are not always accurate and it was an error.
Iâ(TM)m not sure why the phone was showing at our house. There is a high school about half a mile away. Not sure of some student took the phone and walked past our house with it or what.
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He should just put a box in his front yard that says, "iPhone Lost and Found". Stock it with a few of whatever cheapest broken iPhones he can find.
When someone shows up looking for their phone, just be like, "Oh, that's too bad. Maybe someone already took it." -
This happened before with some farm in Kansas. Due to it being nearly dead center in the continental US, it was picked as the center point for any location where they had no information other than "United States"
https://splinternews.com/how-a... [splinternews.com]
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I remember this. It's kind of like the old UCSD Pascal compiler that ran out of error numbers at one byte (255) so any new error message got the last error message: "semicolon missing" as the default. That was always puzzling because it pointed right at the "missing" semicolon when the error was really something else.
This is an error in programming. QA and the programmers should have covered this. Sometimes these are amusing errors and sometimes deadly.
May I suggest that the guy start an iPhone blackmar
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Sign on house:
“Apple is incorrectly directing people with lost phones to our house. Call the police if you need to confirm, or read this article in the NY Post:” with QR code.
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Is the complainant an Apple Customer, or not? If they are, then obviously they have some standing, and Apple might give a fuck. If they're not Apple customers, they're part of the problem, not part of the solution, and Apple will just send round the SWAT teams until one gets lucky.
AFAICT, none of the reporting actually tells us (or Apple) what it is that (allegedly) is sending these irate visitor to the door. If the guy was at (lat,long) of (0,0) I could imagine it. But that's about 1000km off the coast in
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His address could be the geographic center of a larger area - like the city, state etc. It has happened many times before with map systems on not found addresses (but city, state etc valid) - I recall somebody even died in Australia following their GPS to some geographic center of a state that was the middle of nowhere.
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Where someone comes to my door claiming their find my iphone says it is in my house. Fortunately they were generally nice about it, but I did have to insist. I had to tell them it must be wrong several times with technical explanations before they finally gave up and left. At first they seemed to think how could it possibly be wrong? I can easily see this kind of thing not ending well for either party. I would be really pissed if this kept occurring. After then 2nd one I would put up a sign.
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It seems reasonable to believe that someone within the error range of the iPhone gps receiver (who incidentally lives nearby, or with, this father) is stealing iPhones.
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Since we know the thing works properly in a very, very large percentage of situations (you can use it to locate your own devices if you misplace them, and I know for years, it's accurately shown me where all of mine are), I'd at least want to see what else was in the general vicinity of this guy's place.
I could see where someone might even take stolen phones and leave them in the yard of someone else until their battery runs down. Then go and retrieve them. That would throw off people searching for them and
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