LoJack for your iPhone - stolen iPhones phone home
By Will Park on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 1:23 PM PST In Announcements, Apple, Applications, Developer, iPhone, iPhone OS
The iPhone just became a smarter smartphone. With location-based services integrated into the iPhone’s Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps My Location feature, the iPhone can theoretically keep tabs on its location at all times. So, Erica Sadun over at TUAW has come up with a veritable LoJack solution for your iPhone.
Starting with a jailbroken iPhone, adding a private Twitter account, and sprinkling in a little terminal mojo will net you an iPhone that can report its whereabouts at regular intervals. The iPhone will update said Twitter account on a regular basis about the location (well, approximate location via My Location) - giving the user an added sense of security.
Of course, the approximate location data can only give you a very rough idea of where the iPhone thief is holed-up, so short of some miraculous coincidence, don’t expect to get that stolen iPhone back. Just make sure you keep an eye on that iPhone of yours in the first place.
Hit up Erica’s tutorial for more info on how to setup LoJack for your iPhone.
[Via: TUAW]
And what do you do when the thief pulls out the SIM card? This workaround would probably be effective for most people interested in stealing an iPhone (since they would be stupid enough to use it as is), but for the percentage that would jailbreak and unlock it for themselves, this is just another parlor trick disguised as a useful function.
Jonny,
It’s not tied to the actual SIM. As long as there is a network connection the location can be reported. Of course, to use mobile triangulation you need to have some sort of subscription, but sooner or later someone will pop in a sim card to make calls.
A more ingenious approach would be to capture the web browser url’s from the phone cache and send to twitter, this could expose facebook habits, email accounts, etc. and would be very useful in tracking down the perp. This would only require an active wifi connection (no sim).