The Practical Guide To Mac Security: Part 17, Find My Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. This is Part 17 of my course The Practical Guide to Mac Security. MacMost is brought to you thanks to my great group of Patreon supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon to find out more and join us.

One of the most important things that you need to do to protect your Mac, especially if you have a portable Mac, is turn on Find My. You do that in the iCloud Settings in System Preferences. So go to Apple ID, to iCloud, and look for Find My Mac. Now you can only have it turned on for one account on that Mac, which makes sense. After all it applies to the entire device. So, whoever has the primary user account for that Mac. It doesn't really matter. Everyone using the Mac is equal. Just for one of those accounts have it turned on. In this case this is my demo account for recording tutorials so it's not on. It's already in use by my primary account on this Mac. 

Once you turn it on now you can find your Mac if it's lost. So you can use the Find My app on another Mac or on an iPhone or iPad or you could do it on the web on a device that is not even yours. So let's do it here on the Find My app on this Mac. You could see there are three tabs here. People, Devices, and Items. So people would be more for finding individuals that are part of your Family Sharing or that have shared their location with you. Typically this is going to use their iPhone. The thing that's always with them. But Devices is where you would go to check all of your devices that are registered to your Apple ID. So if you own a lot of devices, like obviously I do, then they would all be in a list here. 

So let's say, for instance, you want to locate your MacBook. It's gone missing. You could click on that device here and it will locate it on the Mac. So now you could see it here. You could click the i button and it will give you some options. You can also Control Click on it here and you could see some of the options there. Let's click the i button. It's going to show the location of this Mac as best as it can figure out and this gets reported in a variety of different ways. If this was an iPhone it may be using GPS on the iPhone. But with a MacBook it may be using other devices around it to figure out where it is and report its location back. If it's still within your control, say it's at another location for you or it's nearby, you could play a sound and the MacBook would play a sound and you could use that to locate it. You could also Mark it as Lost or Erase the Device. 

So when you go to Mark it as Lost then you could see here what it's going to do is it's going to lock it. So anybody who has, say stolen it from you, can't access it and it will also deactivate some critical things like Apple Pay that you don't want to be out there if somebody else may be able to get control over. They also can't erase it meaning that they can't now take it, erase it, and try to resell it. The Mac's locked so it's useless to them. You could also just choose to Erase the Device. So if you think it's really gone and you're never getting it back, it's been stolen, you could erase it so your data is protected. 

So you can see how very useful it is to have this turned on. It's a great security feature. It doesn't cost you anything extra. There's nothing you need to do except make sure it's on on your devices because, of course, once it is lost or stolen there's nothing you can do to turn it on at that point. So you want to make sure it's turned ON so you're ready to use it if you need it. Also note that you can go to iCloud.com and from there you can use the Find feature. 

It's still called Find iPhone, I think. At some point they'll just call it Find My or whatever. This allows you to find all of your devices and you could click here and you could see a list of your devices just as before. You could do all of the same features that you could do in the Find My app. The important thing is you could be using somebody else's computer to do this. So if your MacBook is stolen you could hop on somebody else's computer. You can Lock it or Erase it from that location as long as you can log on to your iCloud account you could do that. Having a device stolen is one of the worst feelings and it makes you feel powerless. There's nothing you could do. But with Find My you at least get some of that control back. You could either protect your data and you could also protect the device itself to at least make it less valuable to somebody who has stolen your Mac.