i have recently lost my iphone 4. i had installed "find my iphone" app too. is it possible to erase the firmware without connecting to internet (apple servers)?

is it possible to erase the iphone firmware without connecting to internet?

Yes.

is there a way i can track my iphone with IMEI,SerialNo and UDID number?

No.

Correct.

Any moderately technologically aware thief will know that you can restore a stolen iPhone as a new device and wipe everything from it. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to avoid that.

"Find my iPhone" is really intended for tracking lost iPhone's where someone is not purposefully attempting to stop you from finding it, as a thief would.

Basically, with "Find my iPhone" the sooner you can track it after it being stolen, the less time the thief has had to turn the phone off or restore it.

I don't understand if one has the IMEI no and find my iPhone feature installed, then is it not possible to find th iPhone? I have given the IMEI no. Of my iPhone 4s to the police who have also put it on the tracker but till date no luck!!

If the police is tracking the phone using the IMEI no then if the phone s turned on one shud be abl to track the phone?

Can someone make a suggestion?

Not with the Find My iPhone feature, which has nothing to do with the iPhone's IMEI number.

And the police can do no such thing without the help of your carrier.

If your carrier supports a black list for reported lost or stolen phones which will prevent the iPhone from being actviated with the carrier, you can make use of that, but your carrier won't help you locate the iPhone with the IMEI number either.

A phone's IMEI number cannot be changed.

Simply removing the SIM card can prevent Find My iPhone from being used and the same for powering the iPhone off.

@anand I'm not a big fan of the login password--instead I have apps-with-passwords that have the Really Important info in them, like bank data and whatnot. If you have a login password, then a thief can't get-in to do anything and even an un-knowledgeable thief will surf-around and learn how to Restore a phone to factory settings.

If you have no login passwords, at least you have a prayer of the possessor of your iPhone wanting to play with your phone, make calls, nose around, etc. giving you time with Find My iPhone to track its location.

But a knowledgeable thief will know how to avoid getting tracked.

TomsiPhone wrote:

If you have no login passwords, at least you have a prayer of the possessor of your iPhone wanting to play with your phone, make calls, nose around, etc. giving you time with Find My iPhone to track its location.

Of course that same thief can also read all your contacts, your emails, your text messages, see pictures of your family and friends (if you have such photo's on your phone). Many people consider that sort of infomrations as "really important" too. And a passcode lock is the only way to keep them from reading through all that other information not locked by 3rd party apps with passwords.

So what is more important to you - keeping your private information private, or rolling the dice on the (usually) very remote chance you'll locate and track your stolen phone?

Well I'm referring to free apps such as Chase bank etc. that have their own passwords to protect your $. Then I further restrict access to Accounts and Locations using Restrictions.

There are scenarios I suppose where someone's private life is of interest to a 3rd party, but I really don't care that a thief might see my Contacts if he's also thereby given me the ability to track his whereabouts by virtue of his fiddling-around with my iphone.

For as many times as I look at my iphone in a day, I really don't want to always have to enter a passcode on the chance that the 16,000th time it is a bad guy who is trying to get in.

Fair enough - but note that since you don't have a passcode, the thief just enables airplane mode and they've defeated find my iphone, and now have all the time they'd like to go through the contents of the phone (at least that which is not protected). I honestly do not want anyone with a criminal mentality to have pictures and addresses of my family (especially young ones or those who are elderly).

I just think think that placing minor convenience before security is not wise, nor is relying, in any way, on any data network dependent remote tracking feature for security. I readily put up with the passcode feature since, again IMO, it really is the only actual security feature on a smart phone (or at least, the only one worth a dang). Just my opinion - you have yours and of course are entitled to it.

I respect your position Michael. In my case I carry nothing of interest to a 3rd party nor would the possibility of "blackmail" apply. But at my (advanced?) age I might worry about misplacing my iPhone, and if it has a passcode there is simply NO CHANCE of getting it back (that I know of anyway). That concern trumps the possibility of snatch/mugging/theft for me.

I'm glad there are at least a few intelligent discussions (such as this one? 😉) that serve to educate customers about the ins/outs/whys/wherefores of losing one's precious instrument. Apple has not AFAICT done a whole lot to help customers in this respect, and hopefully in the future will improve their products to remove the need for such "you can do it this way, or you can do it that way, but both ways have cons to go with the pros" hand-wringing.

BTW Michael I have a question for you: am I correct in assuming that if you DO have an "entry passcode" on your iPhone, if someone has turned it on and witnessed (and maybe fiddled with, maybe not) the "Enter passcode" screen, that Apple Location Services will have "found" your iPhone, assuming the phone is within 3G and/or Wifi signal range? I see so many "I forgot my passcode" threads here that I have to assume some number of them are folks who find an iPhone, observe that is is Locked, and then surf-around to see about how to Unlock their new toy. If Apple LS works in this instance, that would go a long way toward persuading me to your point-of-view even for my situation. I guess I can test this easily enough but you probably know the answer off-the-top-of-your-head (I've only had my iPhone for a week or two now). Thanks.

Yes, I do use a passcode. I've been using it ever since my first iPhone 3, and I change it every 6 months or so and I've never forgotten it. If I did forget it, it is stored in an encrypted note on my MacBook Pro's keychain. I keep all my different passcodes/passwords in my MBP's keychain and in an encrypted app (mSecure) on my iPhone (and mSecure uses a different secure passcode to open it).

To my knowledge there is no known way to defeat the passcode lock on the iPhone. Even a simple 4-digit passcode has 10,000 possible entries, so as long as you have not used something easily guessable it is unlikely that anyone will get it in the 10 tries they have to guess with. The passcode lock feature on the iPhone starts timing out after 6 unsuccessful attempts:

6 unsuccessful attempts - 1 minute timeout

7 " - 5 minutes

8 " - 15 minutes

9 " - 60 minutes

10 " - permanently disabled, requires a restore to reset and gain access.

So after 10 failed password attempts, they are locked out until they restore the device in iTunes. If you do it, and you have a backup you can restore from backup (which will also restore the passcode if it was there when the backup was made). Without a backup, the only option is to restore as new, which wipes the device clean and starts it off again as it was new out of the box.

You can also enable the feature where after 10 failed attempts, the device auto-wipes itself out, but the above applies either way - after 10 tries, your only option to get the device to let anyone in is to restore it in iTunes.

Note that while someone was trying to guess the passcode, if the iPhone had the find my iPhone feature enabled, and if it had a data connection (3G or wifi) it would be findable from your iCloud account - someone has to be able to unlock the device to get in to disable find my iPhone (which can be further secured as well by disabling account changes in restrictions, using a different passcode to get into the restrictions settings themselves). They could remove the SIM card which would effectively cut off cellular data connections, but if there was a wifi node available that the iPhone was enabled to connect to, then find my iphone would also still work.