Find My iPhone is a service conceive by Apple and offered to customers who have lost an iPhone/iPod Touch terminal or even an iPad tablet. The service allows the user to locate his terminal on the map based on a GPS/WiFi connection or display a warning message on the screen or even delete all the information from the device. Apple considers that these functions are not good enough, so it has patented a method by which it will offer users additional options through the Find My iPhone service.
The new functions will allow us to delete not all the information from the iPhone but separately emails, contacts, messages, bookmarks, it will allow us to change the VPN connection settings, to block the telephony/SMS function, basically to decide what exactly works in terminal and what not. Apple's system could detect situations in which the terminal sends messages to unknown numbers or calls are made to unknown numbers and could warn the owner about these activities. Besides these, Apple even describes a method by which the sensors in the terminals could be used to detect unauthorized activity and block the terminal completely.
The user could have granular protection of data stored on the mobile device. The user could selectively wipe or scramble the data when the mobile device is lost or stolen. Thus, the user could avoid having to wipe the entire device clean when the whereabouts of the device is unknown. When the data are scrambled rather than wiped, if the user subsequently recovers the mobile device, the data can be unscrambled. The user will not face a complete loss of data. For example, functions that could incur costs to the user (eg, long distance phone calls, text messaging, and data access) can be disabled. Security breach to corporate network could be prevented, for example, by changing the VPN settings upon detection of security risk.
For the recovery of the terminals, Apple proposes the same methods used until now, but there are also mentions regarding the possibility of taking a picture of the person using the terminal, the picture which is automatically sent to an email address of the owner. In addition to recording a picture, Apple also proposes recording the voice of the person who has the terminal, a recording that can later be used in a criminal trial. Apple's system is very advanced but extremely useful from my point of view because it offers much higher chances of recovering a stolen or lost terminal.
