Won't phone thieves just have some faraday bags to pop their winnings into?

Dedicated ones, yes, but their numbers have declined significantly now that the phones can be activation locked.

Opportunistic ones likely won't have such a thing. My wife's phone was once stolen by someone at a hospital lab... after they'd checked in their kid. It was a fairly easy job for the cops to track that down.

You can remotely brick it. The minute that the thief tries to do anything with the device, it's functionally useless. It needs to be online to be reactived, and if the device is marked stolen, it won't activate.

okay, your phone was stolen and you have location. What next?

The likelihood of the local PD deploying resources to recover your $xxx device is extremely low (non-existent), so will you chase down your thief and confront that stranger? Do you have a weapon that you're prepared to use if the bad guy threatens you with one?

All you have gained is the illusion of safety, while more data is siphoned off your device, even while it is off.

Or you're an activist attending a protest.

It’s almost strictly better to leave your phone home in that sort of circumstance though. Your phone looks like you stayed home all day, and you don’t need to worry about things like whether any information gets sent out despite being “off”.

Ideally yes. However, people need to communicate and coordinate. Even arranging transportation may be an issue without a phone.

Sure, but if you really want to, you can communicate and coordinate. I know it might sound old and all, but before the mobile phones and pagers, people managed to communicate and coordinate. Admittedly it is not as easy, but it is possible.

It might actually be a good thing to try, and to step back without a mobile phone and unclutter our current model of communication and coordination. It would likely involve more commitments (e.g. "we said that we would meet at that space and time") and less distraction.

If you're communicating and coordinating while out at this protest then you're being tracked, Find My isn't moving the needle...

You can use your phone to get a ride to a restaurant-heavy district 15 blocks away from the protest, turn your phone off, and walk.

You can use your phone while traveling 1-2 hours to a big city, and then turn it off.

I think you would have to leave your phone home a lot more often than on days you don’t want to be nailed to where you are.

Imagine a case where evidence puts you near a protest or crime scene while your phone is home. That’s coincidence, but if your phone also was home only at the three days three similar events happened, it becomes circumstantial evidence.

Most of the time protests in America only start involving law breaking, riot police and mass arrests after the sun goes down. I’d never endorse perjury, but an argument of “I decided to spend the evening inside” seems like it ought to be pretty reasonable for most people.

Every phone talks to cell towers, and they always track and log your location.

Or the target of a malicious actor.

Ah the ol' innocent people have nothing to hide argument. Been used by bad faith actors for centuries.

Think of the children!

A more reasonable, good-faith understanding would also account for people who don't want to be tracked. I keep GPS and any location tracking on with all my devices because I don't want them to have any more data on me than I can avoid.

The original commenter was proposing that there's multiple perspectives. The replies were all completely ignoring this and adding nothing substantive to the discussion, so I thought a short jokey reply would suffice.

To be serious though: there's a lack of acknowledgement of the functional benefits of tracking by those advocating for control and privacy in this particular instance. The fact is as long as Apple's closed walled-garden is offering actual value to users (FindMyPhone works, and works well, for the common use-case most "consumers" experience day-to-day), while open alternatives are actively sticking their head in the sand around features like this, then closed solutions will prevail.

What's needed is proper discourse on the challenges of e.g. providing practical asset management features that bad actors cannot easily overcome, while at the same time ensuring full user control over their own device and privacy. This is a real world challenge without easy answers: "just turn it all off all the time" is an easy answer, and a cop-out.

If we want to provide quality solutions to e.g. activists, those solutions need to be mature and practical.