Just a question about Find My Mac. Lets say I lose my MBP or it gets stolen, I have this feature setup so i can find where it is at all times, but if it gets stolen or lost, it will no longer be connected to the internet. I have a password on my MBP so the thief or anyone who finds it can't just open it up and connect it to the net. Does that not make the feature completely useless considering it needs to be connected to the net for the GPS to work?
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Find My Mac
- Thread starter jfoley89
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It's really there so that Apple can help out...sooner or later that serial number is going to appear online...I'm not sure exactly how the system works, but from that point on, I'm guessing that Apple can lock the machine. I have Find My Mac, and Back To My Mac enabled on both Imac and rMBP, but I wouldn't rely heavily on them.
Back to my Mac sounded cool, but I decided not to use it because I don't really need it and I'm not comfortable with the potential security risks of sharing.
FMM does not use GPS, it uses wifi to locate the machine.
When you activate FMM it turns on a "Guest" account for your machine. The thief can login to the guest account with no password and hopefully jump on the Internet so you machine can be located. The guest account is isolated from your user account.
but even when my FFM is turned on, when i goto the user screen, there is no guess account, i also have my network settings covered by a password. is there no way they can make it so it connects to the networks around it solely for the purpose of location?
If you turn in FMM in the iCloud pref pane of System Prefs then restart you should see a Safari only guest account at the login screen. Check in the General tab of the Security pref pane... I think there is a checkbox there to disable this and you may have that checked. I can't verify because I have Filevault2 turned on and that changes my screens a bit.
As an aside, if you are really worried about theft and security, you should turn on Filevault2 full disk encryption. It is pretty transparent after the initial encryption and ensures no thief can ever get your data.