How to track a stolen phone, laptop or tablet

The more you use your laptop, smartphone or tablet, the more you have to lose if it’s stolen. The material cost of the loss may be taken care of by your insurance, but consider the fact that your email is now in the hands of a stranger – as is your internet history, which probably contains details of where you shop and bank. The worst-case scenario is that your phone or computer will automatically log you in to sites such as Facebook, which is a treasure trove of valuable personal information.

You can protect yourself by using passwords and PIN codes, but this won’t necessarily protect your data, nor will it help recover your property any faster. Fortunately, there’s a good chance that your stolen phone or computer will connect to the internet again – either automatically, or when a careless thief logs on. With the right software, your purloined hardware can be made to quietly phone home with information that can help you track it down. Alternatively, you can prime an anti-theft service to destroy all stored data as soon as the device checks into the internet.

Some devices, such as iOS hardware, come with tracking and remote wiping capabilities preinstalled; you need only to activate the service. Others, such as certain Dell Vostro laptops, come with a year’s subscription to tracking and remote deletion services. If you’re using an Android device, or a laptop without preinstalled anti-theft software, however, you’ll need to install something yourself.

Where in the world?

The first thing you’ll likely want to know about a stolen device is where it is now. Devices with GPS can normally report their own location to a high level of accuracy, so long as they’re outdoors or near a window. However, even non-GPS equipped devices, such as laptops and Wi-Fi-only tablets, can often get a spookily accurate location fix by using Google’s location API. This works by mining the data gathered by Google’s Street View cars, which includes the geographical locations of wireless basestations. By querying which basestations your device can see, and cross-referencing this with Google’s data, you can arrive at a surprisingly accurate estimate – to within a few yards, in some cases – of the location of a device.

This approach works best when there are plenty of wireless networks around to survey. If there aren’t, another option is to try to guess your device’s location based on its IP address. This is a much less accurate method – an address might be located anywhere in an area up to several miles across – but it’s a starting point.

Tracking a stolen laptop

There are plenty of tracking options out there, including some very high-end, expensive software aimed at IT managers with many devices to take care of. For consumers, there are a few high-quality packages that are easy to set up.

For those happy to spend cash, you can opt for a service such as Absolute Software’s LoJack for Laptops, which will set you back less than £30 inc VAT for a year of coverage. In return, you get the ability to lock your laptop remotely and display an immovable message on the screen – perhaps your phone number, or details of a reward for the safe return of your machine.

Alternatively, you can declare your laptop stolen, which provokes a more dramatic response. In this circumstance, LoJack begins silently capturing screen grabs and logging keystrokes, and sends them back to the Absolute Monitoring Centre, along with geolocation data. This allows the company to build up a detailed dossier of evidence about the laptop’s location and the person in control of it, which is then passed to the police.

If you’re ready to give your device up for lost, the final resort is to remotely wipe all your data. This won’t put your laptop beyond use, but it will at least mean your documents and internet history are removed. The days of remote data removal being the domain of high-end business-class devices are long gone – Apple’s mobile devices come with data removal built in, and it’s easily added to Android phones. On Windows laptops, LoJack can again be used: you can even remove your personal data – either folder by folder or wholesale – through another machine’s web browser. LoJack’s deletion doesn’t merely move the contents of your My Documents to the Recycle Bin, but applies a seven-pass deletion algorithm designed to put data utterly beyond recovery.

On some laptops, LoJack support is built into the BIOS, making the software highly resistant to tampering. Participating manufacturers include Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba: you can see a list of precisely which models are supported on the Absolute Software website. On these systems, installing the software activates the BIOS module, which then continues to work even if the software is subsequently uninstalled. Even reformatting the hard disk won’t stop the BIOS from communicating with the monitoring centre.

It can take a while for commands issued through LoJack to take effect; we waited almost 12 hours for a lock command to take effect, and several hours passed between our issuing a remote wipe command and the documents actually being erased. Hopefully this won’t cause a problem, as long as the person with your laptop doesn’t immediately begin trawling your Documents folder for data. The company also claims that remote commands are acted on more quickly once the software has been running for a few days, whereas we treated our test machine as lost immediately.

Tracking your laptop for free

In October 2011, Kamil Konzinski from London pleaded guilty to receiving stolen goods, after being caught using a laptop that had been quietly phoning home every time it was connected to the internet. The laptop’s owner had installed an application called Prey (www.preyproject.com) – a free alternative to tools such as LoJack which, when activated, creates a detailed report about the state and location of your laptop, which you can access over the web.

By default, Prey provides a handy Google map showing your laptop’s location, as well as a pair of images. The first is a screen capture of whatever is going on at the time; over time this gives you a decent chance of finding your laptop’s new owner logging into a social networking site, or giving away their email address. The second is a photo silently captured from your laptop’s webcam. This gives you a decent chance of getting a clear shot of the thief’s face, which you can supply to the police.

It’s all controlled by a web-based control panel, from which you can mark your device as missing, sound an alarm or lock it remotely. Alternatively, you can display a customisable message, either warning whoever has your machine that it’s being tracked, or possibly – if you’re in a forgiving mood – offering a reward. The only missing feature is the ability to remotely wipe your documents, although Prey offers the next best thing by supplying a secure mode, which disables access to your email and removes your machine’s saved passwords and browser cookies, preventing access to websites containing personal data.

A free Prey account allows you to track three machines at once. Once you designate a machine as stolen, it will file periodic reports of its location, along with captured images. Once ten reports have been generated, the oldest is deleted to make way for new entries. For those who want to cover more devices or save more reports, Pro accounts are available starting at $5 (£3.12), covering ten devices.

Protecting an iOS device

iPhones and iPads have tracking capabilities built in. These work in conjunction with Apple’s iCloud service, so as long as you have an iCloud account, locating, locking and remotely wiping an iPhone or iPad is a simple job. When you first set up your iOS device, you’ll have been asked whether you want to turn on “Find My iPhone” (or iPad). If you said yes to this then you don’t need to do anything more; if you said “no”, you can activate the service now via your device’s Settings menu.

Once the service is enabled, you can track your device by simply logging in to the iCloud website and heading to “Find My iPhone”. Your device’s location will be shown and, thanks to Wi-Fi geolocation, even GPS-less devices such as Wi-Fi iPads and iPods can be found, as long as they’re connected to the internet. With your device located on the map, click the blue Information icon for more options, including sending a message to your device, locking it remotely (with a PIN code) or, the nuclear option, wiping it remotely.

The service is obviously most effective on iPhones, which have a persistent connection to the internet without needing to be logged into a wireless network; and it’s worth noting that it won’t work at all if the thief has wiped your device and paired it with a new iTunes account. Your chances of finding your device are greater the faster you act.

Protect your Android device

When it comes to safeguarding an Android phone or tablet from theft, Google Play is brimming with apps to protect your handset – including several from big-name security firms such as Kaspersky, Norton and McAfee. These all offer slick apps with similar theft prevention features, most of which are controlled through web interfaces. Location tracking uses the geolocation components inside your device to pinpoint its exact position on Google Maps, and it’s possible to remotely lock your phone.

There’s a more drastic option common to these apps too: the ability to give your phone a factory reset if it’s fallen into the wrong hands or, if you’d like to attract attention, the option to sound a blaring alarm by pressing a button on Kaspersky, Norton and McAfee’s websites.

Such apps aren’t cheap. WaveSecure and Kaspersky offer seven-day trials, but you’ll have to cough up £13 and £20 respectively if you’d like to continue using them. Norton, meanwhile, doesn’t let you use its alarm, location and locking features unless you pay £30 for the full version. If you look outside of the big brands you may find better value for money.

In particular, there’s an Android version of Prey that offers more features than the big names – and which is completely free. As well as providing location tracking, phone locking and alarm services, Prey for Android also tracks the IP and MAC information of any networks your phone is accessing. If you suspect your phone is stolen, you can send a text to remotely activate Prey to begin tracking your device – and you can grant the app administrator privileges, so it can’t be uninstalled by more tech-savvy thieves. For a guide to installing Prey on your Android phone or tablet, follow our step-by-step tutorial.