Find My iPhone is a pre-loaded Apple iPhone and iPad app that’s designed to locate your device in case you ever lose it. It also doubles as a great tracking tool if you have kids and want to keep up with where they are. 

People usually use VPNs to watch geo-locked content from other countries and to gain a little more anonymity on the internet. 

A VPN is designed to hide you on the internet and Find My iPhone is designed to find you.

They’re kind of opposites, so will the anonymous nature of using a VPN affect the Find My iPhone’s location feature?

Does A VPN Trick Find My iPhone?

A VPN will not trick Find My iPhone. The Find My iPhone feature uses a variety of wireless protocols (mainly GPS) to generate a location and it feeds that location to iCloud, where the “Organizer” can retrieve it. 

GPS, Bluetooth, 4G/5G networks, and WiFi are all used to triangulate the approximate position of the iPhone’s location and an active VPN doesn’t hide that information. You can use something like Nord VPN’s spoof feature to send a fake location but that wouldn’t be enough.

A VPN will be able to trick an app that uses your IP address to find your iPhone’s location, but it won’t fool apps like Find my iPhone, which uses your device’s GPS location for tracking.

Find My iPhone also sends pings to Apple devices that are close to your device. Those nearby devices then send their own coordinates back to Apple’s servers to get an approximate location on your device.

So your iPhone can be found even when it’s not sending out its own location.

How To Trick Find My iPhone

There are a few things you can do to trick Find My iPhone, including using a second Apple device, using an app to fake your GPS location and just turning the Find My iPhone feature off on your phone.

Using A Second Apple Device

Putting your Find My iPhone on an old iPhone or a cheap iPod Touch and then leaving it wherever you want your GPS location to be is probably the most effective way of tricking Find My iPhone. Having any other Apple device that is signed into the same Apple ID allows you to easily change where your location is being shared from.

Use An App To Fake Your GPS Location

You’ll find some apps on the App Store, like Find location – share with U, that will allow you to fake your GPS location.

If you happen to get caught out, you can just say that the Find My iPhone feature on your device glitched out and shared the wrong GPS location.

Turning Off Find My iPhone 

Just turning the feature off on your iPhone is probably the easiest and most obvious way to trick it.

Open up Find My iPhone and let it log your location before turning off all location services and shutting it down.

But if someone is using it to keep tabs on you, it’s not going to be the most foolproof solution. 

Related Article: Can A VPN Cause Roaming Charges? (Explained!)

Why VPNs Find It Difficult To Trick Find My iPhone

Find my iPhone works in interesting ways. For instance, the above list of GPS, WiFi, carrier networks, and Bluetooth are used, however, Apple has a primary way of triangulating your position that has little to do with your VPN. 

Apple’s Find My iPhone actively uses other people’s Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, AirTags, and every other possible Apple product out there to search for your iPhone. 

That’s right, if there are ten iPhones around you, in a particular building, and an Organizer is searching for your iPhone, those ten iPhones are helping the Organizer locate you.

All Things Considered

With U1 chips installed in every Apple device since the iPhone 11, it’s easy to find your precise location with the Find My app.

VPNs are designed to mask your presence on the web, not block every Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, and the cellular signal coming your way.