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Iphone Bug

Texas Dad Says 'Find My iPhone' Glitch is Directing Angry Strangers to his Home (abc13.com) 161

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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Texas Dad Says 'Find My iPhone' Glitch is Directing Angry Strangers to his Home

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  • .. how many stalkers plant AirTags on their victims and then wind up at this guy's place.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Ocamms razor says this guy is criminal
      • No it doesn't. the hypothesis that requires fewest assumptions is that there is a bug in the Apple software.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Default coordinates: No, not enough cases for that. People would be queuing up at his door. Hiding phones in tinfoil bags near his home: That wouldnâ(TM)t work. You have to take the phone out of its bag.
    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)

      by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @08:55PM (#63435938) Journal

      and then wind up at this guy's place

      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, doxxed, had tons of government agents visit with guns drawn, and more, until the mapping company moved the position of the tag to the middle of a lake and paid off the family.

  • It happed to us (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VikingNation ( 1946892 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:10PM (#63435732)
    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.
    • Re:It happed to us (Score:5, Insightful)

      by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo.schneider ... e minus math_god> on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:00AM (#63436080) Journal

      You probably had an open wifi, or someone else close by.
      The phone connected to his mother base and this was the latest report of its location.
      Or it still had a cellphone connection, but lost it shortly after it last report from close by you.

      It is not rocket science. If it happens once: the phone most likely was close by and this is its latest report. There is nothing magically or unbelievable about this. If it happens many times, like in the story: there is something wrong with the book keeping at the mother base.

    • It is possible and not usual that the phone is nearby. It could be in your neighbours garden and _your_ phone found it. Or itâ(TM)s three doors to the left and the phone of your neighbour two doors to the left found it and his GPS isnâ(TM)t precise enough.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Could just be that whoever took it was walking past your house the last time it registered on Apple's "Find My" network. Maybe one of your iPhones reported the ping and location back o Apple, sending the mother and daughter to you.

      Another possibility is WiFi. Apple uses known WiFi access points, collected by wardriving and from customer's iPhones, to supplement location data. If a WiFi AP moves it can throw off location information until the system updates.

  • by NateFromMich ( 6359610 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:22PM (#63435758)
    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."
  • Farm in Kansas (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:37PM (#63435784) Homepage

    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]

    • 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

  • by AnonCowardSince1997 ( 6258904 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:41PM (#63435790)

    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.

    • 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.

      Yes, the kind of person that will roll up to a stranger's house looking for their stolen property will be dissuaded by a sign.

    • by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      and have Apple sue them for libel/slander?

    • with QR code.

      Which they can scan with their lost phone?

  • 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

    • by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      If the guy was at (lat,long) of (0,0) I could imagine it. But that's about 1000km off the coast in the Bight of Benin, which is not now, and never has been, in Texas. If the address had (lat,long) of (Apple's #1 US base, Apple's #2 US base), I could imagine it. But at the moment, this is just an unsupported claim by JoeRandomTexan, which never has been the strongest base for believing anything more consequential than the state of the weather in Texas.

      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.

      • by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Sunday April 09, 2023 @03:46AM (#63436230)

        somebody even died in Australia following their GPS to some geographic center of a state that was the middle of nowhere.

        Did they get a Darwin Award?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        You would hope that in that case the display would show a large circle, indicating the whole geographic area the item could be in. I seem to recall that they put a dot in the middle, and that is quite misleading. They should make it very clear in the UI that the device could be anywhere in the entire area.

        They should also indicate how old the location data is. If it's a day old it's probably worthless for a mobile device like a phone. If it hasn't pinged in a day it's probably been wiped or stripped for par

      • His address could be the geographic center of a larger area -

        Yep, seen that before. Entered the post code (which should cover a range of less-than about 50 addresses constituting a "bundle" of letters for the postman (-woman, not yet -robot) to deliver) for a tourist attraction. Went to indicated position on SatNav - no tourist attraction. Since the attraction was around 40m tall, this was surprising. Later worked it out that the location I was being steered to was the geographic centre of the limits of th

    • He may or may not be an apple customer, it doesnâ(TM)t make a difference. His phone is not involved in this. My phone is lost, your phone finds it, tells apple, and somehow apple tells me this guys location. Itâ(TM)s your phones fault or apples fault.
      • Wait - what?

        So, this Apple "Find-a-Gunman" tool actually works by somehow "other" phones logging the location of the missing phone and reporting it to Big Brother In Cupertino?

        That is incredibly optimistic. and incredibly invasive.

        Does it depend on you (a "passer-by" or the "missing" device) having all of BlueTooth, GPS, and several of the "NFC" tools enabled? I do know of such things - and turn them on when needed. Which has been zero times this year for GPS, zero times for NFC, and when I'm talking to

  • by botmaster42 ( 6970014 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @06:59PM (#63435826)

    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.

  • Get a Lawyer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by emeade ( 123253 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @07:51PM (#63435888) Homepage

    Sue Apple.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Get an AirTag, attach it to someone else's property, and claim they stole it from you.

      • Get an AirTag, attach it to someone else's property, and claim they stole it from you.

        I hear that some people do that to women's cars. Just sayin'.

  • 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.
  • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Saturday April 08, 2023 @08:38PM (#63435920) Journal

    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 put the blame on someone else.

  • If it happens that often, just sue Apple, they are the ones responsible for showing it at the wrong location.
  • Some years ago lots of phones in the USA reported their location as "somewhere in the USA" which was turned into some fixed location 200m from some farm with an error of 2000 miles. Obviously everyone ignored the error. Problem was solved by reporting the position as being somewhere in the middle of a lake.

    In this case: Apparently theres a lost iPhone. A nearby iPhone detects it, sends its location to apple, apple sends it to the owner. It is the location of the nearby phone, the lost phone doesnâ(T
    • Do you get timestamps with these things? So you could make an educated guess whether a location ping is just a sign that the object of interest passed by, or whether it is presently pinging from that location?

    • by mlyle ( 148697 )

      My guess: location services uses GPS if available, but falls back to wifi.

      If you have a thief in the neighborhood, this dude's wifi could be the last time the phone gets a location fix, and the last-known position of the phone.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      It happens because "precision" isn't stated well.

      There are many sources of location information.
      First, you have GPS, if you can get a signal, this will give you a fine location.
      Second you have WiFi. If you capture some WiFi beacon packets, you can use the MAC address to location databases to identify the general area where that WiFi is located.
      Third, you have cell tower - cell towers have IDs and just like there's a database of WiFi MAC addresses to locations, there's a database of cell tower IDs to locatio

  • Didn't take long for these comments to turn into a debate about US gun laws, or lack of them. Perhaps there should be a law like Godwin's Law but concerning discussions turning into gun law debates. How about Nukenerd's Law?
  • I had this exact scenario happen to me -- albeit only once so far.

    A mildly inebriated young man and his friend rang my doorbell late at night claiming that his phone was somehow in my house. I politely sent him away. He actually came back a few minutes later re-asserting his claims. I told him to call the police if he believed I had his stolen property. Mercifully, that was the last I saw of him.

  • Find my phone behavior is ML and robotic based service kinda crude AI search. Evidence to what kind of future is in store for humanity dependent on machines.

  • ... as a criminal defense strategy. Cite the instances in Texas and Kansas where location data is faulty as the basis for "reasonable doubt".

    Example: Kohberger (alledged Moscow Idaho killer) gets the search warrants of his parents home thrown out because his cell phone location data may very well have been in error.

  • Sometimes these "random wrong address returned" cases happen when the property is located in the geographical center of a state or country... When the lookup systems can't narrow it down more than "it's in Texas, probably", it may just slap a pin in the center of the state... Or just pick a point on the prime meridian (0 degree longitude), which runs through Greenwich.
    Location-wise Richmond TX seems like an unlikely default result.
  • That darn fly!

  • by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Sunday April 09, 2023 @05:59PM (#63437386)

    Remember a week ago when Truck Thief Gunned Down by Owner After AirTag Gives Away Location [slashdot.org]? Remember how a bunch of people said, essentially, good, serves him right? This story is the counterpoint, and what scares me about that whole attitude. It could have gone down the same way here. Doorbell rings. The guy calling claims the homeowner stole his iPhone. Homeowner denies it. Accuser gets belligerent, someone ends up dead. Doesn't matter which one. Neither of them stole anything. Just someone dead because of a misunderstanding and a macho sense of entitlement. He's a thief, he deserves to be shot, right? Or, the other guy came to someone's home, made false accusations, and threatened(*) the homeowner, so he deserves to be shot. Isn't that the way it works? (* Doesn't matter if he did anything actually threatening, so long as the homeowner says afterward that he felt threatened.)

  • The various find X programs are set up to give you the 'best possible' results and do not show the accuracy.

    If they obtain accuracy to the nearest meter / yard, they pick a spot in the middle. That works fine. If they get accuracy to the nearest zip code, they show the middle of the zip code. That does not work fine.

    Nearest county works horrible. Nearest state is worthless. Nearest country is the worst example I ever heard. There is a farm house in the exact center of the country that used to have pol

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