[Slippery_John]

I can think of several scenarios:

* I lost the phone hiking somewhere with no signal

* I lost the phone / it was stolen while in airplane mode

* I lost the phone while traveling abroad without any local service

This finding service will work for wifi-only ipads, wifi-only apple watches, and macbooks in addition to the likely tracking tokens.

[Fnoord]

Stolen while in airplane mode, and you're going to rely on BLE? A "good" thief would learn that he'd need to carry around a Faraday cage (read: some tinfoil) to block the signals. The only disadvantage is that the act of putting tinfoil around an iPhone then becomes suspicious.

[ars]

> (read: some tinfoil)

Try it. Wrap your phone in tinfoil then call it. It will still ring.

It's harder than it looks to make a Faraday cage.

[marcinzm]

They'd just have a tinfoil lined bag. No suspicion. I bet you can buy one one Amazon for next to nothing as it is.

[alexkavon]

Someone could wrap a phone in tinfoil pretty quickly or have one ready-made in the shape of a pouch. Or start carrying a special pouch that stops signals.[0]

Either way once you remove the phone from sight, the suspicion is probably over. The only next step is to kill the signal.

[0] https://www.overyondr.com/howitworks