Apple will not return a stolen iPhone to to the original owner after the thief took the phone in to get serviced due to the victim’s failure to file a police report. 

After getting her iPhone stolen, one reader relayed to Consumerist the tale of her failed attempts to try to get it back from AT&T and Apple. The crime happened on the subway in New York city, after which the victim promptly called the police who searched the area to no avail. 

Several weeks later the victim received an email from Apple notifying her that someone had filed a request to replace her broken phone through Apple Care. Her email was linked to the serial number of the phone so she received all messages regarding service and warranty work. After hours spent on the phone with Apple and AT&T she was notified since a police report was never filed she doesn’t have sufficient evidence to get her phone back. 

“So I call AT&T… and over the course of 12 hours I speak to a bunch of people who are all very sorry that this is the situation I’m in, but their hands are tied — they have to honor the warranty and it does not matter that it’s clear the phone is mine. They would need the authorities to tell them to do otherwise,” writes the victim. 

Despite the fact that she went to the precinct and had the authorities call Apple to verify her story, Apple stuck to its guns. To Apple, she has no real way of proving that she is still the owner of the phone. Apple has refused to act on her behalf and instead chose to honor the warranty agreement.

(come on Apple!)

(via AppleInsider.com)

Oh & as this is the 1st post of the new year, Happy New Year!

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A new feature in the iPhone 3.0 firmware appears to let users remotely pinpoint a lost or stolen phone by securely requesting the device’s location via Apple’s MobileMe service.

The setting appears under the MobileMe settings page, where push updates for mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks are configured. Below these settings is a simple control to activate “Find My iPhone.”

When activated, the phone opens an alert that says, “this enables the “Find my iPhone” service on your MobileMe account at me.com.” It would appear that the service obtains the iPhone’s location and makes it available to the MobileMe user on request if the unit is lost or stolen.

The rationale for linking the feature into MobileMe is evidently the same as that behind Apple’s Back to My Mac feature: security. By only allowing the linked MobileMe account to obtain a location remotely, using GPS or WiFi/cell tower triangulation, users don’t have to worry about an outside party being able to track their location.

MobileMe supports setting up secure IPSec tunnels between remote clients over the Internet, acting as a catalyst by tracking the locations of MobileMe-registered systems and securely publishing their location to other MobileMe-registered devices using Wide Area Bonjour.

In this case, the iPhone would simply give its registered MobileMe user the option of remotely requesting its location. The settings to support the new feature are not yet visible on the MobileMe website, as the iPhone 3.0 firmware is currently still in developer release and won’t ship until this summer.

(via AppleInsider.com)

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