Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.
But the phones aren’t there, Lee and Saba always protest, mystified at being fingered by these apps more than a dozen times since February 2015. “I’m sorry you came all this way. This happens a lot,” they’d explain. Most of the people believe them, but about a quarter of them remain suspicious, convinced that the technology is reliable and that Lee and Saba are lying.
“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this,” said Saba by email. ( Like this guy .) “If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far.”
People, after all, can get pretty desperate when their tech appendages go missing . And sometimes, it’s not just a phone that’s missing, but a person. In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him.
“Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest,” the officer said, according to Saba.
The couple, who are in their 20s, she a journalist and he an engineer, worry the police will kick down their door one day, a scenario that has happened before based on faulty Find-My-iPhone tracking
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Yikes!
I would think they could sue the maker of the app for wrongful {fill in the appropriate legalese} ...
Exactly.