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For a device with GPS, several unique identifiers, & constant connectivity, there's no reason why an iPhone should be able to be stolen and used for anything by anyone but its rightful owner.

Logging into iCloud should not only present the find my iPhone GPS feature, but allow you to reroute all incoming communications to the web portal, have it alert you when the device comes online or auto-record location tracking & whatnot, give you the option to monitor the iPhones cameras & mic, record discretely, and prepare it as an easy package to hand to police. Police won't usually bother with recovery of a stolen phone, but if they don't have to hunt for it, and can see/hear/record the thief with the goods live, it makes for an easy recovery. Looks good at the end of a month. ...especially if it was stolen with a car or other items. iCloud should be the total control portal for your devices.

find my iPhone is pretty inconsistent sometimes or else i'd be in the middle of the atlantic ocean every once in a while, plus its not that hard for a thief to turn it off and restore it ...
 
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My wife and I went through this. Not with a stolen phone, but hers broke. I lent her mine and swapped SIMs. Our messages were flummoxed the whole time. I could read hers, se could read mine, and new messages often showed as sent from the wrong account. Tried toggling iMessage etc, but none of that worked.
Swapping the SIMs back solved the issues. Obviously something we could only do because we physically had the phones.

Are you still married?;)
 
Fair point. I've added to clarify. None of my stores had one for long enough for anyone to bother asking if it wasn't in one of the test phones and none of the AT&T reps I've ever encountered would dare set foot or communicate with an Apple store other than on launch days.
Yeah, that's about right -- though if you go high enough up the food chain at AT&T they can make things happen. Or get your ops manager or Genius Admin to open an Escalator Ticket with Store Ops.
 
I'm the person who originally alerted Jacqui at Ars Technica to this problem. I'm grateful to her for giving it the attention it deserved as trying to talk to AppleCare about it was useless.

At this point, it has gone from bug (they happen) to coverup (unacceptable). At this point publicizing this via the tech press hasn't had the necessary effect. Does anyone know a tech savvy senator or congressman who could hold a hearing? That might force Apple to act.
 
You know this has happened to me as well. After taking my 3GS the Apple Store for repair, I am now getting the iMessages from some other dude. I don't mind though, as his life seems more interesting than mine. #
 
Yes it is a bug. apple is wrong. I have some unrelated I messages on my phone right now of conversation of other users. that just showed up on my phone.

PS my phone is not stolen

I've had a very similar experience. Someone I had previously iMessaged kept getting messages from "me" - except I wasn't sending them. My phone (iPhone 4) wasn't even on.
And for the record, my phone has never been stolen, nor is it a second hand phone- I bought it new when the 4 first was released.
 
Steve Jobs famously said "What is MobileMe supposed to do?" to which he got a reply to which he answered "So why the ****** doesn't it do that?!"

Substitute iCloud for MobileMe and it still works. When they got rid of it, MobileMe did everything I needed, without fuss. iCloud is one big disaster after another, has hardly any features worth diddley squat, and only works on Lion which doesn't work in our office because of it's own many and varied inadequacies and problems, missing features and toys copied from iOS which work on a Tablet but not on a Mac.

Apple, you really are losing it.
 
find my iPhone is pretty inconsistent sometimes or else i'd be in the middle of the atlantic ocean every once in a while, plus its not that hard for a thief to turn it off and restore it ...

Well, yeah, it should actually work.

Just saying, that's a list of functionality from me thinking about it for 5 minutes. There's no good reason that after 5 years, Apple still doesn't have some kind of recovery interface handy. Almost looks like they have a "finders keepers" stance instead.

Actually, the more I think of it, a lot of iOS's functionality is starting to look fairly crude compared to what it "could" do.
 
Steve Jobs famously said "What is MobileMe supposed to do?" to which he got a reply to which he answered "So why the ****** doesn't it do that?!"

Substitute iCloud for MobileMe and it still works. When they got rid of it, MobileMe did everything I needed, without fuss. iCloud is one big disaster after another, has hardly any features worth diddley squat, and only works on Lion which doesn't work in our office because of it's own many and varied inadequacies and problems, missing features and toys copied from iOS which work on a Tablet but not on a Mac.

Apple, you really are losing it.

iCloud is arguably a more ambitious undertaking than even MobileMe. iCloud does 100% of what I want it to do, such as making keynote presentations on mac and getting it onto my iDevices quickly, backing up my purchased music, Photostream is great on my 1 gen iPad when I take a picture on my iPhone. No, it doesn't do my laundry, but it does most of what I would expect it to do.

As far as iMessage goes, the iPhone is not meant to be stolen. I'm sure Apple will issue a fix as soon as they can, whether or not they consider the issue a bug.
 
I think it's a bit of a tenuous case to declare it "not a bug". iMessages continuing to receive messages for a previous SIM card is definitely a bug, as it means it's not checking the SIM card on start, and instead using some kind of cached information.

The fact that this happened when an Apple employee swapped SIMs is not a bug, the fact that SIM swapping can cause this issue is.

I'd still much rather an Apple employee admits this is a serious issue and gets someone onto fixing it.
 
They are supposed to. Each Genius Bar should have at least two "Known Good" SIMs. If they don't have them, they need to get in touch with their AT&T rep.

It's probably not even that hard. I bet apple has some website just for such things.

Sounds like this guy wants to makes excuses for his team not being able to keep their stuff together

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Does anyone know a tech savvy senator or congressman who could hold a hearing? That might force Apple to act.

I thought the whole support page to remove devices from your apple id was a known fix.
 
I'm the person who originally alerted Jacqui at Ars Technica to this problem. I'm grateful to her for giving it the attention it deserved as trying to talk to AppleCare about it was useless.

At this point, it has gone from bug (they happen) to coverup (unacceptable). At this point publicizing this via the tech press hasn't had the necessary effect. Does anyone know a tech savvy senator or congressman who could hold a hearing? That might force Apple to act.
My suggestion is to file a class action lawsuit, there could be very real damages associated with this.
 
I'm selling my iPhone 4 tomorrow. I removed the sim with the phone on and then went to settings and reset all settings and data. Should that be okay? I don't wanna sell it if the new user will be able to get my iMessages. =[
 
So what this means is the guy who bought my iPhone could have gotten a picture of my wife's tits that was taken and sent with the ipad2? Bravo apple!
 
I think it's a bit of a tenuous case to declare it "not a bug". iMessages continuing to receive messages for a previous SIM card is definitely a bug, as it means it's not checking the SIM card on start, and instead using some kind of cached information.

The fact that this happened when an Apple employee swapped SIMs is not a bug, the fact that SIM swapping can cause this issue is.

I'd still much rather an Apple employee admits this is a serious issue and gets someone onto fixing it.

Precisely. I agree 100% with this whole post.

I wish I could vote you up more for this.
 
So if your iPhone gets stolen, simply send yourself an iMessage that says "hey honey, i will lookup the bank account number and password and send it to you in a minute....."

The thief will be so tempted by this he may actually keep the iPhone turned on and out of Airplane mode and turned on so you can track them with Find-My-iPhone (so long as your account settings have the restrictions turned on to prevent them from shutting that off).

Seriously though, Apple needs to allow for server-side disabling of which devices get your iMessages.

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I'm selling my iPhone 4 tomorrow. I removed the sim with the phone on and then went to settings and reset all settings and data. Should that be okay? I don't wanna sell it if the new user will be able to get my iMessages. =[

You can test that.... Set it up on WiFi with a bogus (new) Apple ID and send yourself an iMessage on your new device. See if both devices get it.
 
You know this has happened to me as well. After taking my 3GS the Apple Store for repair, I am now getting the iMessages from some other dude. I don't mind though, as his life seems more interesting than mine. #

Are you sure that he is not getting your messages? Do you even mind?
 
Has anyone tried changing their Apple ID password? My iPad and iPhone were linked for iMessage, After changing my password iMessage asked to re-enter it and stopped receiving messages until I did.

-Just saying
 
If anyone has physical access to your phone (even your locked phone) for 30 seconds, they can pop out your sim card, install it into their phone and turn on iMessage, then put your sim card back into your phone. iMessages directed to you will now go both to your phone and their phone and you will never know. Pretty bad design flaw/bug. Apple needs to address this security/privacy issue, instead of blowing it off. They have known about this issue for at least 2 months.
 
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iMessage needs to be linked to find my iPhone then. Cause if this was implemented into find my iPhone you will still be able to track it after a wipe!!!!
 
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