Cell Phones

Can I wipe an iPhone with Find My iPhone active? I don’t care if Find My iPhone stays active after the wipe.

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  • Apr 16th, 2019 1:46 pm
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Mar 23, 2009
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Can I wipe an iPhone with Find My iPhone active? I don’t care if Find My iPhone stays active after the wipe.

My kid was given a bunch of old iPhones for a charity drive. Most of them have a clean slate but one phone is completely wide open with no passcode so all the personal data is available. It does have Find My iPhone on though, protected by an iCloud password. Another one has data but is passcode protected. For this second phone I don’t know if Find My iPhone is on or not, since obviously I can’t get into it to check.

Before I donate these, can I delete all the private data on the phones? I don’t care if Find My iPhone stays active on these phones. I suspect the the other clean phones may be refurbished for resale for the charity but these latter two phones may just have to recycled.
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Mar 18, 2005
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You can wipe the phone but the charity won't be able to use them until Find My iPhone account has been logged out. When the install starts again its going to demand that account be entered to continue with the process.
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For the phone that has a passcode, put it into recovery mode, connect to iTunes, and perform a restore. After restoring, it will ask for the iCloud credentials during the activation process if find my iPhone has been enabled.
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Evil Baby wrote: You can wipe the phone but the charity won't be able to use them until Find My iPhone account has been logged out. When the install starts again its going to demand that account be entered to continue with the process.
Ok thanks. That’s all I need as I just don’t want to donate them with user data on them. The charity will get a decent haul from this anyway overall. I see that the clean iPhones (16 GB iPhone 5) can go for about $100 on the used market. The two other iPhones will just have to be recycled for parts or something.

audit13 wrote: For the phone that has a passcode, put it into recovery mode, connect to iTunes, and perform a restore. After restoring, it will ask for the iCloud credentials during the activation process if find my iPhone has been enabled.
I will wipe/restore both phones. Hopefully the passcode protected one doesn’t have Find My iPhone active but I’m not optimistic.
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Excellent. The passcode protected one did NOT have Find My iPhone on, so that one is a completely usable phone now. So, only one the phones is now Activation Locked. Not a bad ratio for that charity.

Thanks, people. You were a great help.
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Nice. Called Telus up twice, each time to unlock one phone, and both times were successful. I wasn't sure if they'd unlock them or not because I'm not a Telus customer.
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Good work. I'm sure the charity will be thankful.
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I ended up bringing the iPhones to a local shop to sell. The proceeds of the sale will go to the charity. The charity was going to recycle the phones along with a bunch of old flip phones and old era candy bar phones as well as some non-working smartphones, and it seems the recycler just gives them some nominal amount for the bulk donation. Thus, going that route it's unlikely these fully functional iPhones would have netted them as much money.

It turns out a couple of the iPhones had screen yellowing, which the store pointed out to me. I didn't really notice too much yellowing at first glance before going to the store, but yep, it's definitely there, so it was reasonable they offered less on those ones. They're still checking them out but it looks like I'll get a couple of hundred bucks and then some for them. I would have gotten more if they were all unlocked but I couldn't be bothered to spend any more time on this. Yeah, I would have gotten more on Kijiji too, but I hate Kijiji these days. I don't even sell my own perfect babied more recent iPhones on Kijiji cuz it's so much of a headache to deal with. Anyhow, the organizer of the drive seemed quite pleased with the amount, especially considering this is an amount coming via just one person (my kid).

BTW, with regards to unlocking, as mentioned the carrier seemed to be quite happy to unlock for non-customers as long as the phones have clean IMEIs, but it takes about 10-20 minutes for each phone call. An alternative though would have been eBay, at just $1 per phone, but it can sometimes take a couple of days.

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