Gotcha! Give my stolen phone back

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• Apple’s spy in the sky

Here’s a story to warm the heart of anyone who’s ever had their cellphone stolen.

Katy McCaffrey had her iPhone nicked while on a Disney cruise holiday in April.

She reported the theft, but with hundreds of potential suspects aboard she wrote it off as gone for good.

So imagine her surprise when, several weeks after arriving home, pictures taken by the alleged thief began to appear, as if by magic, on her computer.

This was when McCaffrey remembered she’d enabled the online photo streaming facility that comes with Apple’s iCloud service.

Every photograph snapped by the phone’s new “owner” was beamed via iCloud to McCaffrey’s Photostream album.

The pictures clearly identified him as a crew member of the cruise liner Disney Wonder and showed him enjoying an ocean sunset, partying with his mates and posing with his girlfriend.

Understandably miffed at his brazen flaunting of her iPhone, McCaffrey posted a series of the images on Facebook in an album titled Stolen iPhone Adventures, accompanied by no-punches-pulled captions like: “This is X (name withheld). X has my stolen iPhone”, “Uh oh. (His) girlfriend does not look happy with him. I understand the feeling”, “Maybe she saw him pose with these two pirate hookers on board the Disney Wonder. No denying it X, that’s your name tag, isn’t it?”

Disney Cruises’ reaction was swift and the hapless X was placed on “administrative leave”.

“We take these matters very seriously,” a company spokesman said. “We have a zero tolerance policy for this type of behaviour. We recovered the phone and we’ve been in touch with the guest.”

McCaffrey has since received a new phone.

Facebook’s response was equally swift. Apparently concerned that McCaffrey’s identification of the suspect was premature, it took down the “offending” pictures and captions, but not before the case had become an internet sensation.

McCaffrey has since reposted the pictures, with slightly toned down captions on her blog (visit GeekBeard.Posterous.com for a link).

If the clueless X had been more tech savvy he would have known the photo-streaming feature could be turned off using a simple on/off switch in the phone’s settings.

The irony is that he was rumbled by a feature not designed to catch thieves – iCloud has another feature designed specifically for that purpose which McCaffrey seems not to have enabled.

It’s called Find My iPhone and allows owners to see their phone’s location on a map, pin-pointing it using GPS, WiFi and nearby cellular towers.

Since its launch last year, it has reunited thousands of iDevice owners with their precious iPhones and iPads – it now also works with MacBook laptops.

British mugger Munya Chimutengwende, 21, was just one of the most recent criminals to fall foul of this digital bloodhound after he snatched David Landy’s iPhone as he checked his messages outside a London Underground station.

According to The Telegraph newspaper, Find My iPhone placed the thief at a cellphone store in north London, where he had just sold the handset for £270 (R3 500).

He was arrested shortly afterwards in a nearby branch of McDonald’s and jailed for 18 months.

The moral of the story? If you own an iPhone, iPad or MacBook, make sure you’ve got iCloud and Find My iPhone enabled.

I’ll post links to step-by-step instructions on how to do this on my site, GeekBeard.Posterous.com.

But what if you’ve got a non-Apple device? The good news is there are several powerful programs that will help you keep tabs on them.

Unfortunately there’s no space to go into them here, so I’ll cover them in a forthcoming column.

I’d also love to hear from readers closer to home who have used Apple’s or any other company’s tracking wizardry to sniff out their missing gadgets. - Sunday Tribune

E-mail me on alanqcooper@gmail.com or tweet @alanqcooper and I’ll include the best stories in my write-up.

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