Find My comes in three flavors:

• Device-based, two-way short-range and internet: This version is the original and better understood, and can be enabled on devices: an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and, by extension, an Apple Watch paired with an iPhone. The device actively sends its location over the internet whenever the internet is available. Find My Device allows the owner of a device to send remote events, like playing a sound or triggering erasure, to a device. Apple and Beats audio devices near their paired device act like this as well.
• Find My notification network: The Find My network is a one-way notification system that relays location via other people’s internet-connected devices. It can be enabled on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and is an inherent attribute of “items”: AirTags and third-party Find My products. Audio devices like AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and several models of Beats earbuds and headphones act like Find My items when away from their paired device. An owner can’t send commands via the Find My network.

The AirTag, some audio devices, and other items can receive a command to play a sound via Bluetooth from a nearby device. This allows either an owner or someone whose device has been relaying Find My network location data to play a sound on an AirTag.

• Device-based, Bluetooth range: For Apple AirPods, you can track location only when they’re near their paired iPhone or iPad. They use Bluetooth and don’t participate in the broader Find My network, but their current or last-known location appears in the Devices view in Find My (and the Apple Watch Find Devices app in watchOS 26 or earlier). An owner can trigger a sound when they are near these audio devices.

Because devices can connect to either the two-way or notification network, the other way to look at it is this way:

• Devices can use both networks: An owner of a device can perform a remote action whenever it’s connected to the internet (or its paired device is and is nearby, with audio hardware), but can see its location when it’s picked up via either form of Find My.
• Items can use only the Find My network: Items can only ever report their location.

Turn on Find My for a device

Local- and internet-based Find My on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac requires an active Apple Account associated with iCloud. You likely already set up Find My when upgrading or setting up your device.

To enable Find My on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, if you haven’t signed in with an Apple Account yet, go to System Settings/Settings > Account Name > iCloud and enter your credentials.

On an iPhone or iPad, tap Settings > Account Name > Find My to view and make changes in settings; these settings also affect any paired Apple Watch. On a Mac, go to System Settings > iCloud > Show All. If Find My isn’t enabled, turn it on. Once Find My is active, you can tap or click the Find My item to access additional settings, like the Find My network or, on an iPhone/iPad, Send Last Location.

Enabled devices are automatically added to your iCloud account’s list of devices. For supported devices, Apple enables Activation Lock.

Turn on the Find My network

Find My network tracking has distinctly different options depending on whether you’re enabling it on devices or using it with items. Here’s the breakdown for those categories.

Apple enables the Find My network on iPhone, iPad, and Mac by default. Any Apple Watch, AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, AirPods Pro or Max, or supported Beats audio device paired with an iPhone is similarly tracked. You can toggle this setting as follows:

• iPhone (plus Apple Watch)/iPad: Change the Find My network option in Settings > Account Name > Find My > Find My iPhone/iPad.
• Mac: Go to System Settings > Account Name > iCloud, click Show More Apps, and click Find My Mac.

Disabling the Find My network also removes your device’s participation in finding other people’s lost items.

There’s one hidden requirement that Apple doesn’t document, because it’s implicit; the company has spoken about it publicly. Because finding devices over the Find My network requires the use of encryption secrets stored only on devices, you have to have two devices enabled on the network in order for one to find the other. That way, they exchange the necessary secrets using Apple’s privacy-preserving framework without Apple possessing any of your encryption keys. (This is quite similar to how iCloud Keychain works.)

In other words, if you have a single device that’s lost and it can connect to the internet, you’re using the two-way Find My system. A single lost device that can’t connect to the internet also cannot use the Find My network to find it, because there’s no other trusted device that can query Apple for the secret Find My network details. You can’t use iCloud.com for crowdsourced device location, as iCloud.com doesn’t store the Find My network secrets, much as it doesn’t store iCloud Keychain password entries and other secrets.

This requirement isn’t in place with items, because you can already discover the location of items that aren’t nearby only by using the Find My network from a device.

Powering off no longer hides a phone

When an iPhone series 11 or later model is in the extremely low-power “power reserve mode” or “powered off,” as long as your device has any battery power available (or is plugged in), it will continue to send Bluetooth beacons for location discovery if the Find My network setting is turned on as described above; you can also disable the network temporarily, as described next.

In this power reserve mode, you should be able to use Express Mode for transit system payment even if your iPhone (or Apple Watch) can’t do anything else.

Powering down a device offers up a warning in small type that highlights this change. Tap the warning to get the full details. You can tap Temporarily Turn Off Finding, enter your device passcode, and then power down; on the next power up, Find My is reactivated.

Items are always on

AirTags are designed to work both via short-range networking directly with a paired iPhone or iPad and through the crowdsourced system. When you set up an AirTag, it’s enabled for use on the Find My network, as described in how to set up an AirTag.

Third-party Find My network items have a slightly different pairing process, but remain active at all times, too; see how third-party Find My trackers differ.

Apple and Beats audio devices appear under the Devices view in the Find My or Find Devices app because they report their location via a paired device when in range (which is almost certainly often). When not in range, they rely on the Find My network. AirPods can only be tracked via the paired device, while all the other Apple and Beats hardware can use the Find My network. (I guess Apple didn’t want to confuse audio device owners by classifying these higher-end devices with single-function trackers.)

You can reset a Find My item, remove its battery, or use a special disable sequence to stop it sending out a stream of location data. See how to reset or disable an AirTag.

Notify When Left Behind helps with absent-mindedness, exhaustion, and theft. Using your presence, whenever you move a certain distance away from a device or item—Apple doesn’t define how far—you receive a notification on that device.

Found on the sheet for any device or item in native Find My apps, it’s enabled by default under Notifications. You can choose to disable it on a per-item basis. Apple also excludes the place you defined as Home or Apple inferred was your Home.

The device on which you would be notified is listed as part of the explanation when you tap or click Notify When Left Behind.

Your Apple Watch doesn’t alert you when something is left behind (and the Find My app explains this); instead, the alert comes only when the item is separated from your primary presence device, typically an iPhone. (See how Find My works.)

Notify When Left Behind helps in a bunch of scenarios I can imagine:

• Forgetting you placed an iPad in the seat-back pocket on an airplane. (This is certainly a main cause of loss for iPads and Kindles.)
• Leaving an iPhone, iPad, or Mac in a coffee shop or restaurant.
• Forgetting your backpack that has an AirTag in its pocket at someone’s house.
• Checking your luggage at an airport or train station for a trip.
• Leaving items at a hotel room, hostel, Airbnb, or the like after checking in during a trip, such as in a hotel safe.
• Not packing your laptop in a bag you’re carrying with you before leaving for school or work—or vice versa!
• Locking up a bike that you’ve attached a Find My item to at your destination—then forgetting you biked there and taking a bus home. (Folks, if you bike regularly and you haven’t made or almost made this mistake, count yourself lucky.)

Trust a place

When you’re notified, you can tap Don’t Notify Me, and the location where your Find My item or device was left will be added as a location. If you have an Apple Watch, a notification on the watch also lets you tap Trust Location or Dismiss.

You can also suppress this notification in a Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac by selecting the item or device, which then shows where it was last seen. You can tap or click Don’t Notify Me Here.

When you add a location through this method, the operating system prompts you, “Don’t notify at map description of location?” You can then tap or click “For all Items or Devices,” “For this Item/Device,” or Cancel.

You can also manually add other locations to exclude by tapping or clicking Notify When Left Behind, then New Location. The map interface for location selection is identical to the one for People. You have the additional option when you click Done to add the location to select “For all Items and Devices” or “For this Device.”

You can accumulate a list over time of places that you don’t want to be notified about items being left behind at. For me, this has become an interesting travelogue of all the hotels, homes, and workplaces I’ve been at.

You can clean this list up by removing locations. On an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, tap or click the remove button to a location’s right. The exception is the Home location, which can be removed only on the device that establishes presence. You can view those locations on an Apple Watch, but not remove them.

It is not an anti-theft feature

Because the notification occurs only when the device remains static and you’ve left it behind, it is not an anti-theft feature. Conceivably, we need Apple to add the opposite case, too: Notify When Moves Away. Perhaps this could cause both the device that’s taken and the hardware that notifies to both squeal uncontrollably until reunited?

A bag in a hotel safe

As I was revising this edition, I received a text from a friend. After a trip out of state, he’d realized he’d forgotten to retrieve a small bag in the hotel safe. He didn’t care much about the bag—except that it contained his passport! The bag also contained an AirTag, but he wasn’t alerted that it was left behind for several hours.

He could see the AirTag in what appeared to be the parking lot. A few slightly clueless hotel front-desk people seemed helpless, although one walked out into the parking lot and said the location appeared to be a grate. Maybe a thief had thrown the AirTag down its openings? But that would mean someone had stolen it from the room safe or lost and found after he had checked out.

After a day or so, a more clued-in staffer called back: it was in the lost-and-found safe, which apparently other people hadn’t checked. For $60, the hotel used a third-party service to return the bag. And then he watched as it didn’t move for days—requiring three more calls to the hotel—before it finally landed at the airport near us. And then sat there for a day before UPS put it on a truck.

The related setting: Notify When Found

Device notifications don’t let you see when something comes or goes, but instead provide you useful feedback related to losing something or having it stolen.

Find My enhances its Lost Mode/Mark as Lost option by providing a notification option after you mark a device as lost. This notification can occur when that device is “found”—that is, when it’s back online, however briefly (see what someone sees when they find your lost device).

Notify When Found is disabled by default on the sheet of actions for a device or item in a native Find My app unless it’s been marked as lost. Then you have just the option to turn it on or off. If enabled, a notification appears on your devices in one of two cases: a piece of your equipment detects the missing item; or the device or item reports its location through Find My or the Find My network.

Disclosing your location is a two-edged sword—or maybe a multi-bladed throwing star. It can be incredibly handy to let other people know where you are for travel, safety, timing, and even accountability. However, letting others know where you are means they know where you are, which even for close friends, family, and partners can feel like too much knowledge and the expectation of you sharing your position can feel invasive. (You also may feel it’s excessive that, when you launch Find My, you can see the precise location of everyone who has shared with you, even though they did so willingly!)

Apple tries to strike a balance with location sharing just as it does with nearly all other aspects of digital privacy that they mediate and let you choose your comfort level with.

Find My is the interface through which the location you share from an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch gets viewed, but it’s only partly the way in which you choose what is shared! That split is left over from when Apple introduced the previous standalone app, Find My Friends, and relied on preferences buried in Settings to manage all the details.

When you share your location, the other person cannot see your devices, but only your presence: the device marked as showing where you are. Only people in a Family Sharing group can see each other’s devices, and only if the person is sharing their location with them. Items don’t pick up Family Sharing settings. You can share them with up to five people.

Location has two interrelated components: how you share your location and how you choose to accept seeing other people’s locations. Let’s start with you.

You can use the native Find My app to view and change personal settings, even if you’re part of a Family Sharing group:

• On an iPhone/iPad, watchOS 27, and macOS 27: Go to the Find My app > Me button.
• In macOS 26 and earlier: In the Find My app’s People view, click Me and click the Info button.
• In watchOS 26 and earlier: In the Find People app, tap the Me entry.

Here is what appears in the My Location section on all these devices:

• Share My Location: A single tap, and you let yourself be seen by those you’ve shared with; another tap, and you run silent—your location isn’t sent again until it’s re-enabled.
• Sharing From: Often called presence, this defines which devices are shared in Find My as being your location as a human if you own multiple devices. My Location reads This Device if you’re on the one defining your location; otherwise, it shows the name of that device. (See how Find My works.)
• Location Label: At the top of the Me view, you see the current inferred address. However, Find My tries to offer something more descriptive. If you’ve defined your home or work location in Contacts or Phone, it should show Home or Work as the label. You can also create your own names for other addresses; see how to see someone’s location in Find My.

Share with someone

You can share your location in more than one way, and the interface is essentially the same with slight differences.

Here’s how to share in various ways across your Apple devices, from most universal to most specific; how to set the duration option is discussed after these instructions:

• On an iPhone or iPad, or in macOS 26 or later:

— Find My app: Click or tap the add button at the upper-right corner of the list in whatever view you’re in. Enter names or select people. Click the checkmark button. Now choose a duration.

— Messages: In any conversation in Messages, tap or click the avatar or avatars. On an iPhone or iPad, tap the Plus button, choose Location, tap Share, choose the duration (see below), and tap the Send button. On a Mac, click Share My Location, choose a duration, and press Return to send.

Tip: If your recipient or group isn’t all Apple users, you can still send an image that embeds a link to a map; instead of Send or Share, the button reads Send Pin.

• In macOS Sequoia or earlier:

— Find My app: In the Find My app, click the People button, then click Share My Location. Enter names or select people. Click Send, and choose a duration.

— Messages: In any conversation in Messages, click the Info button in the upper-right corner. Click Share My Location and choose a duration. Press Return to send the location message.

• On an Apple Watch:

— Find My app (watchOS 27) or Find People app (watchOS 26 or earlier): In watchOS 27 only, first tap People. Scroll to find Share My Location. Tap it to either dictate a name, choose a contact, or enter a contact’s phone number.

— Messages app: In the Messages app in watchOS 26 or later, choose a conversation, tap the add button, choose Location, tap Share, and choose a duration.

Note: When someone requests your location, as explained ahead in If You’re Asked to Reciprocate, you can’t use a single tap from an Apple Watch. You have to use one of the above methods.

Note: You can’t share your location with others or see their location in the Find Devices app on iCloud.com.

Choose how long it lasts

No matter which path, platform, or version you’re using from the above list, you’re asked to pick or set a duration: Always (formerly Indefinitely), End of Day, One Hour, or Custom. (These options are worded slightly differently across apps.) The Custom choice is new in the version 27 releases. Selecting that option lets you set a duration from 15 minutes to 30 days.

If you shared via Messages, you see a note in the conversation that says “You started sharing location with person name.” The recipient sees “Person name started sharing location with you.”

I’m guessing Apple switched in the version 27 releases to the simpler word “always” after years of using “indefinitely” because more people can easily parse “always.” Indefinitely has the ring of “inflammable” about it: does it mean forever or for a period of time? (Inflammable items are just as easy to set on fire as flammable ones.)

If you choose anything but Always/Indefinitely, a countdown clock appears when you view the details for that person’s entry in Find My: it reads “Sharing for X time units” in the version 27 releases and “X time units remaining in previous operating systems. Messages displays a map tile with an inset yellow countdown clock for the remaining time. In Apple Watch’s Find People app, the contact’s avatar is overlaid with a timer; tap the entry to see the remaining time as text.

Family Sharing is a separate switch

For greater flexibility, Apple also lets you use Family Sharing settings to enable to disable location sharing among group members. Go to Settings/System Settings > Family > Location Sharing to see family settings.

In Location Sharing, you see all the other members of your family sharing group and your current sharing status with them and theirs with you—sort of!

If you used this interface to share your location, or used the Automatically Share Location option (enabled by default) for new members, you see sharing enabled next to the group member. However, if you used the Find My app to start sharing your location, it may appear that you are not sharing with them! You’re just not “family” sharing with them! Yes, it’s as straightforward as a bent nail.

Under the Share Your Location With section, you can also see which of the group members are sharing with you. Again, this is dependent on how you shared. In the figure, you see “person name is sharing your location with you,” even though four members of my family group are sharing their locations with me. Oy!

See who can currently find you

Once you start sharing your location with other people, you might lose track of precisely who that is. Fortunately, you can see a list in a few different places:

• Native Find My app: Use the Find My app’s People view or the Find People app on an Apple Watch (watchOS 26 or earlier). Everyone in the list who reciprocally follows you appears with location information; everyone else you share with has the label “Can see your location” beneath their name.
• Find My settings: On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Find My, and you can see Family (if you’re in a Family Sharing group) and Friends. This doesn’t show reciprocal sharing status, however.
• Family settings: If you’re part of a Family Sharing group, Settings/System Settings > Family > Location Sharing reveals any group member with whom you’ve shared using Family Sharing settings. See that befuddling situation above in Share Location with Family.

We’re all quite rightly concerned about our private data stored on our most personal devices—the ones we carry with us all the time. Apple has done a stellar job in locking down access to an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. But there’s still a fear: what if someone guesses our passcode or passphrase, or uses some new cracking technology to break in?

Apple offers an excellent option that can assuage some fears. You can remote erase your device by sending it an irreversible command that takes place immediately if it’s connected to the internet, or as soon as it’s next connected—if it ever connects again.

What happens when you erase a device in Find My?

• A confirmation email is sent to your Apple Account email address.
• When you erase a device remotely using Find My, Activation Lock remains on to protect it. Your Apple Account password is required to reactivate it.
• If you erase a device that had iOS 15, iPadOS 15, or later installed, you can use Find My to locate or play a sound on the device. Otherwise, you won’t be able to locate or play a sound on it. You may still be able to locate your Mac or Apple Watch if it’s near a previously used Wi-Fi network.

Erase an iPhone or iPad

The last resort in some cases (or first in others) is a remote wipe, in which all the user data on an iPhone or iPad is erased.

An erased device that has Find My enabled before erasure and remains associated with an Apple Account cannot be unlocked without the account password due to Activation Lock.

The erase option lets you provide a phone number and message so that a person who found (or stole) your device can get in touch. The device is essentially useless to them without the password.

Once you erase a device (or if someone else has), Find My can find its location only if it’s an iPhone or iPad running iOS 15/iPadOS 15 or later. Before that release, erasing a device disables its ability to send Find My tracking data when connected to the internet.

You can remove a device from your Find My list; see how Activation Lock protects a lost or stolen device.

It’s a multi-step process to prevent accidental erasure; you can cancel at any stage until the last step:

The device will be erased immediately at the last step. If you’re using two-factor authentication, it is also removed from your trusted devices at once.

1. Go to the Find My app .
2. Tap or click Devices at the bottom of the screen, then tap or click the name of the iPhone you want to erase.
3. Tap or click Erase or Erase This Device.
4. You’re warned that everything is about to be erased. Tap or click Continue.
5. Optionally enter a phone number at which you can be reached after it’s erased, and tap or click Erase.
6. Enter your Apple Account password and tap or click Erase. If this is another member’s device, accessible via Family Sharing, enter their Apple Account password.

If the device is online, the Erase action immediately wipes all your data. It’s fast because it throws away encryption keys that are used to secure your iPhone or iPad data—it doesn’t have to write zeros over all the data. If the device is offline, the erase begins as soon as it next comes online through any networking method.

What you actually lose

Wiping your device isn’t as bad for your stored data as it sounds. All iPhones and iPads are set by default to back up the unique data that’s stored on them, like settings, passwords, and documents created by or associated with apps. These backups can be either local to a Mac on a particular computer or remote to iCloud.

Apps are stored centrally, not in a backup, and restored from Apple’s servers; the same is true with synced books and purchased music, movies and TV programs. If you use iCloud Photos and Sync Library (for Music), that media is stored in the cloud and synced. (If you’re not using either, you probably sync music with a Mac or Windows system. This is a good time to check that you’re up to date with syncing.)

If you erase your device, and then either recover it or obtain a new device, you can restore from your most recent backup. If you were syncing any items to your device through Photos, Music, or other apps or tools on a Mac, you can then sync them back to the device. For items stored in iCloud, the restore process downloads them again.

You can accelerate restoring an iPhone or iPad with Apple’s Quick Start. Place one of your iPhones or iPads near another and follow the steps provided. This streamlines setup. In a final step, you can choose to restore from an iCloud or other backup.

If any unique data was syncing from your iPad or iPhone to iCloud, Dropbox, Exchange, or another service, you should retain changes up to the moment the device disconnected from a cellular or Wi-Fi network. You will lose only changes made on the device between the last sync (push, fetch, or manual) for each account and the remote wipe.

Erase a Mac

The process of starting is nearly the same as with a mobile device:

Macs can’t be tracked after erasure. The device will be erased immediately at the last step. Two-factor authentication will also drop it from your trusted devices.

1. Select the device in any Find My app and reveal its sheet.
2. Tap or click Erase This Device.
3. Review Apple’s warning. Click Continue.
4. Enter a message that will be displayed to someone who has or finds the machine and click Erase.
5. Enter your Apple Account password and tap Erase. If this is another member’s device, accessible via Family Sharing, enter their Apple Account password.

The selected Mac will now be erased. How long that will take depends on hardware features. Erasure is nearly instantaneous.

Be sure you always have a current backup that you can restore from in case your Mac dies, there’s a natural or house disaster (fire, flood, collapse), you lose it, or someone breaks it or steals it.