‘So if you have Find My iPhone or Life360 you won’t be able to track’: Expert says turning your iPhone on airplane mode is the first thing that thieves do. Here’s a trick to stop that
If in your usual phone-wallet-keys pat down you find that the former is missing, there is a quick way to ensure thieves will not be able to prevent you from finding it.
For iPhone users, a tracking software is installed on the phone—Find my iPhone—that requires the internet to work. But what happens if someone prevents your phone from connecting to Wi-Fi or accessing a cellular signal? One content creator says there is a fairly simple way of preventing this from being an option.
In a TikTok that has drawn over 3.5 million views, technology content creator Dany (@dnay1.0 on TikTok) shares a trick. She says iPhone users have a way to prevent anyone who is not them from accessing settings on their phone.
"If your phone is ever stolen, the first thing they're going to do is turn your phone on airplane mode," she says. "The reason they do that is so you can't track your phone. So if you have Find My iPhone or Life360 or anything like that on your phone to track it, you won't be able to because it has no Wi-Fi connection, no service, no nothing."
She then explains how to prevent that from happening.
"Normally, whenever you have your iPhone locked, you can swipe down from the top on the lock screen and see this control center," she explains. "From this control center, you have access to all these options, so therefore you can turn airplane mode on. I'm going to show you how to turn this off, so if your phone is ever stolen, they can't do that."
The Daily Dot has reached out to @dnay1.0 via email regarding the video.
How to do this trick?
She first instructs the viewer to go into their phone's settings and tap on Face ID and Passcode:
- Next, she advises to scroll down to an option labeled "control center"
- Users can toggle off an option to allow their control center to be viewed without providing a passcode and biometric information
This will prevent anyone who does not either know your passcode or have your face from accessing these settings, she says.
Are there other ways to prevent theft?
Turning off access to the control center is not the only way iPhone users can protect their phones from thieves. If a bad actor cannot sell the phone, the information on the phone also has the potential to become valuable. This includes personal information, data, passwords, and banking data in the wrong hands can do some real damage.
But there's a quick way to fix that.
Per Tom's Guide, you can enable your phone to delete all data if someone fails to input a correct passcode after 10 attempts.
Another way that might seem obvious is enabling Find My iPhone in the first place. iPhones also allow users to toggle on a setting to send their last location to Find My iPhone once the battery gets low. Therefore, the phone can still be tracked to a certain extent once powered down or it runs out of juice.
This would come in handy, as viewers pointed out, because a thief is likely to power off an iPhone they can't break into.
"They will just turn the phone off…," one commenter wrote.
"Can’t they just turn the phone off?" another echoed.
"What if they power off the phone?" one said. "Can I still track it?"
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