ICloud Find your phone?

[whitbey]

My wife has an iphone. She is geographically challenged and loses her phone.

When I try and access her account from my Windows laptop, the system wants to use a second tier security and text a code to the Iphone that one needs to get to the account to find the Iphone. I have tried adding my phone number to text, but that does not work. I cannot seem to turn off the extra security. Seems like there is a way to use this system if the phone was lost. As my phones are VOIP and Android, I am not familiar enough to get this figured.

Any ideas?

[Matt K]

You have to have another apple device. The two factor they have built in isn't technically SMS, it's apple based. So if you had like, an iPad or Mac with the same account, you'd also get the "Is this you trying to connect?" message on that. Alternatively, if you had an iPhone, they can share their location based on your AppleID and you could see the location on your phone (which is what my wife and I do so we don't have to call each other to see, for example, how close someone is to being home or not and distract them while they're driving).

[whitbey]

You have to have another apple device. The two factor they have built in isn't technically SMS, it's apple based. So if you had like, an iPad or Mac with the same account, you'd also get the "Is this you trying to connect?" message on that. Alternatively, if you had an iPhone, they can share their location based on your AppleID and you could see the location on your phone (which is what my wife and I do so we don't have to call each other to see, for example, how close someone is to being home or not and distract them while they're driving).

Would an old iphone on wifi work?

Or how can you turn off the two factor thing?

[SimmonsTrombone]

I have an iPad on Wi-Fi only, and it finds my iPhone, so an old phone would be worth trying.

[Matt K]

Yeah anything that you can log into the iCloud account with that is also an Apple product should work. I’m not aware of any way to turn it off. It used to be more permissive but then a bunch of celebrities had their iCloud accounts hacked because they didn’t have 2FA turned on (and had really bad passwords) so Apple just decided that it was better to not let you access without the 2FA.

[tjonz]

This should help: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204921