Apple’s ghost button

Do you track your kid with Find My iPhone? Does it show they’re upstairs right now? Maybe go check if they’re actually there.

Quick refresher, in case your spouse set it up: Find My is the free app that comes on every iPhone and shows you where your family’s phones are on a map. Yes, that map. The one you check at 11:40 on a Saturday.

On September 14, Apple released iOS 27, the newest version of the iPhone’s software. Your teen installed it before you’d heard of it, and they’re starting to figure out what’s inside. Tucked in there is a button called Hide Location. Your teenager opens Find My, taps People, taps your name, and right under “My Location” taps Hide Location. Poof. Your map says “No Location Found.” Apple’s own pop-up spells it out: you won’t see them “until tomorrow at 4:00 AM,” and you “won’t be notified.” Which conveniently covers one Friday night.

Here’s the sneaky part: on your phone, “No Location Found” looks exactly like a dead battery or a dead zone. So when your teen says “my phone died,” maybe. Or maybe they tapped a button.

It’s pretty obvious nobody at Apple has a teenager, or this would have been killed in the first meeting.

It gets better. Is your kid hanging on to an old iPhone? It’s not nostalgia. Teenagers are telling us the move is to leave an old phone at home, still logged in to their Apple account, so Find My shows them tucked safely in their bedroom while they’re very much not. That “broken” phone they dramatically refuse to throw away is not a keepsake. It’s alibi infrastructure.