This happened to a coworker of mine once. The feature was turned on by our IT department after he set up his work email on the device so he didn't really know about it.

He came to work one day pretty upset about Apple's "Delete your iPad when your kid plays with it" feature.

> The feature was turned on by our IT department after he set up his work email on the device so he didn't really know about it.

Perhaps don't let children fiddle with your work devices? That just sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

I have a strict policy to not let my kids play with phones. (Books and toys are plenty fine.) And I don't let my phone hang around and used as a passive toy (in locked mode) either. Yet more than once my phone has been "found" and the max password attempt has been triggered. It happens really easily despite my efforts.

Now in the grand scheme of things, this is just an annoyance as I can restore the phone from up-to-date backups. If someone is concerned enough, they could also toggle the wipe feature on/off based on their travels and live with the risk of an accidental wipe knowing that things can be restored.

On the iPhone, 2fa codes must be set up again manually using recovery codes - can't be restored from backup. Huge pain in the butt IMHO

This can happen from carrying it in your pocket. Moisture (sweat) from your leg can cause random inputs on the touch screen.

Solution is to put the phone in your pocket facing outwards. Also prevents turning on the camera or flashlight with your leg.

Sounds like it was a personal device that had access to work email. That's a whole other issue that I wish had a better option than "adding your work accounts lets anyone using the phone see them."

Considering the exponential growth of mandatory lockout timers between repeated failed attempts, i'm not super worried.

Correct. I think it takes something like a total of 4 hours of failed password logins to trigger a wiped phone. That is a long time to be worried about your kids playing with the phone.

Once the phone is wiped you can restore the phone from backup. If you allow kids to play unsupervised with a phone for 4 hours, I hope you have it backed up for a variety of other worse case scenarios.

>A relative of mine saw her phone get wiped after letting my toddler fiddle with it for a few minutes.

Yea... You might want to check that story. It's a staged timeout. First 1 minute, then 5, then 10, then an hour, then 3 hours or something like that.

Not that a toddler wasn't playing with the phone for 4 hours straight - just that if you let that happen you should expect a broken phone.

Sure it is, and that's why you have proper backups. iCloud is stupid simple to setup, and forget about until needed.

Law enforcement can also subpoena Apple for your iCloud data. It's hosted using a key that they control.

This is about their kid accidentally deleting their phone.