Downloading a free mobile application can be the sole reason someone finds their cell phone once it is stolen, University Police Department detective David Huff said.
Freshman medical technology major Nathan Okey recently benefited from one of these apps. Last fall, he used Google Latitude to reunite with his lost phone.
"I probably wouldn't have been able to find my phone without it," Okey said. "For an app that was free, it ended up saving me a lot of money."
Find My iPhone and Google Latitude are two downloadable free apps that use GPS and cloud computing to determine the location of a stolen cell phone, Huff said. From any electronic device with an Internet connection, Huff can discover a cellphone's exact location. He said retrieval of stolen phones has noticeably increased on campus.
"A couple of weeks ago, we had an iPhone that was taken from the [Student Recreation and Wellness Facility]," Huff said. "The police report was filed immediately after it was noticed gone. The following day, we logged onto the iCloud account the victim provided us with and drove to the exact location of the phone and recovered it."
The suspect was later charged with felony theft.
In another case, the victim's iPhone was tracked in real time, Huff said. Find My iPhone showed that the thief was on the move. The suspect was pulled over and the stolen property was found in his vehicle.
Once downloaded and activated, Find My iPhone and Google Latitude provide not just the police, but everyone with the ability to connect with their phone by other electronic devices, the opportunity to find it.
From a computer, users can simply type in their passwords. Then they can locate, send a message to, lock or erase the memory on their phones. Because of the various tools these apps offer, they are useful in recovering both stolen and lost phones.
Students with these apps have around a 60 percent better chance of finding their phones, Huff said.
"This is a program that our students could use that would help them in multiple ways," Huff said. "It's free, it's easy and if it's stolen, it makes it so much easier for us to find it. It only takes a couple seconds to search yourself up."
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