What happens if you are out and about and happen to find an iPhone? You happen to be a good person and want to return the iPhone to the original owner, but the phone is locked with a passcode. You might think you are stuck, but actually you can use Siri to find out who owns the device.
Tap and hold the home button to activate Siri. You can say “Who owns this phone,” “Who’s phone is this,” “Who does this iPhone belong to,” or “Who does this phone belong to.” Siri will then respond and display the information of the device’s owner.
However, if you ask Siri “Who’s iPhone is this,” or “Whose iPhone this is,” Siri responds back with a snarky response directing you to apple.com.
To make sure that your phone is set up properly so if asked Siri will answer with your information, open up Settings and scroll down until you see Mail, Contacts, Calendars and tap on it.
Then scroll down until you see My Info under Contacts. Then you will see a list of all of your contacts and you can select yourself from the list. If need be, you can always create yourself as a contact and put in the information you would want a stranger to see in case they find your phone.
Also, make sure you have the Medical ID set up in the Health app so that way in case your phone does get lost someone would be able to find out who owns the phone, as well as contact your emergency contact.
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Allow me to rephrase this article as:
How to completely bypass all security on any iPhone and access personal information about the owner.
You didn’t read the article if you believe that.
you can tag a separate contact in siri setting page, totally different from the one used in mail, contact, and calendar.
You Can create a New contact but then you will not able to ask to Siri: how can I reach my home (GPS map) because if you set your address in your owner contact and you lose your bag with your iPhone inside and the keys of your home it could be a big problem
And there is also another problem: just few people know about this feature so just few people will create a new personal contact, most ones will give to the thief all infos about address name surname birthday name of parents …
The feature is interesting but it should be disconnected from the traditional principal contact (a manual activation of the feature with the creation of another contact).
You can ask Siri only, when “access from lock screen” is activated for Siri. If so, Siri will also generate phone calls to persons in the contact list. Try it out!
Great article, but there is a bit of a mistake …
Why would you want to ask “Who’s phone is this?” (you ask it twice!).
It’s not necessary for the sake of the article to include all the possible mis-spellings is it? It’s only necessary to ask “Whose phone is this?” and leave the bad grammar issue for those that have a problem with it.
I mean you are actually promoting bad grammar here.
Yeah, this is a pretty noticeable oddity begging the question, “Why bother?”
Apple made a couple of very odd choices here. Having a different answer depending on the finder asking about “this phone” or “this iPhone” seems pointless and totally counterproductive. What could possibly be the logic here? Keeping someone from getting information about a lost phone if they know its correct brand name? And displaying a proper name, e-mail address, phone number, and possibly a photo user icon isn’t a good thing if the phone has been stolen rather than lost and the thief can make use of that info in some other way. Wouldn’t it make much more sense if the finder asking “whose phone/iPhone is this?” were directed by Siri to a special “Report a found iPhone to Apple” page so that Apple can contact the owner instead?
You get to decide how much information is displayed, so I see no problem with the way Apple has implemented it.
Very helpful. Thanks!
Wow, tried it on my iPhone and you can see my name, phone, address, personal email, workplace, work phone, address and email, and my birthday. That’s a LOT of info.
go to setting-general-siri. scroll down and you will see “my info”. by default, it is the same one used in mail, contact, calendar’s my info. however, you can create another contact and only provide info you want a stranger to see, then go back to siri setting page and tag the simplified contact. give it a try. it works for me.
please omit my comment, i thought it worked, but it didn’t. sorry.
Works for me!
sorry again for the confusion.
i guess for your own contact, you only want to put information that you’d allow a stranger to see. after all, you should already know everything about yourself.. :)
if you store personal info in your own contact, then you probably should create a “private” contact for sensitive information.
i hope apple will allow users to choose separate contact item in siri when owner’s info is asked in lock screen.
Dude, just create a separate contact using ONLY info you want strangers to see.
Mine says my name, first name of my emergency contact person and their phone number, an alternate, and in the notes section I included my blood type, organ donor and allergy info. Using custom labels and some trial and error, I came up with a pretty complete contact that works well on the lock screen.
Then go into Settings>General>Siri>My Info and choose THAT contact.
You don’t need Apple’s permission to choose and use whatever contact info you want.
The only problem is that that’s also the Contact that’s used when you say “I need to go home” or “I need directions to my house”… which I use all thr time while I’m out.
So you would lose some flexibility by using a “dummy” contact.
I really think that Apple should just give us some options about how much to display of our own contact info on the lock screen.
Tha said, I’m not particularly worried enough about it to change over to a dummy contact or anything….
nice
The problem with creating a separate paired down card, is that you will only resolve the issue halfway. By doing this, you are in fact disabling a lot of the functionality that was built into your card previously, such as being able to say something like “call my wife” or “call my office”. All the relationships you had built into your card, are no longer in the new card, thus disabling all of these functions. Apple should be able to provide an option for users to create an emergency card, that could be used when the iPhone is lost, or in case of a medical emergency.
Great, but how do I enable data/4G from the lock screen?
WHAT IF THE OWNER CONDEM THE PERSON AS THE THIEF
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