Find my mac how does it work

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:. It allows users to locate a missing device. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Jeremy Laukkonen. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on September 25, Tweet Share Email. Apple Macs iPad. This is your Apple ID password, not your local Mac password.

How do I turn off Find My Mac without a passsword? Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! The solution to that paradox, it turns out, is a trick that requires you to own at least two Apple devices. Each one emits a constantly changing key that nearby Apple devices use to encrypt and upload your geolocation data, such that only the other Apple device you own possesses the key to decrypt those locations.

That system would obviate the threat of marketers or other snoops tracking Apple device Bluetooth signals, allowing them to build their own histories of every user's location. In fact, Find My's cryptography goes one step further than that, denying even Apple itself the ability to learn a user's locations based on their Bluetooth beacons.

Improve this answer. Mike Scott Mike Scott Just to clarify. Apple did use the Skyhook database in the past, but these days they have created their own much larger database by croudsourcing from iPhones that happen to be turned on with their GPS active when they encounter any wifi network without needing to actually connect to the wifi.

All of Apple's GPS-equiped devices will also use wifi triangulation while waiting for the GPS to get a fix, and because wifi is thousands of times faster to give the GPS chip an approximate location so it can focus on just the last few metres of the location fix. Community Bot 1. Bluetooth Beacons works even inside buildings. Mathias Bynens Mathias Bynens A router's ethernet interface would have a different MAC address.

They can be located through wifi networks. Anonymous Anonymous 1. How does this improve or differ from other answers - in this case it is the same but provides less information than another answer — mmmmmm.