Quick question:
- Bought a secondhand Macbook pro over ebay.
- Seller told me "I logged off from iCloud but forgot to turn off Find My Mac.
- Bought it anyway since I do not plan using iCloud.
- Now I got news that if he wants he can track and block my Mac.
I have administrator account access, the EFI is not password protected since i asked him to wipe it out, so:
Can I simply log in with my iCloud account to the Mac and disable Find My Mac?
It's not nice to know that somebody can "track me".
More info:
The seller formated the drive before sending it to me, when i turned it off i got to the first time installation wizard. There's no apple id associated to the macbook and the only user is the one i did create in the wizard and has no icloud account associated whatsoever.
So, is it even possible to log off from your icloud account without disabling "find my mac"?. i've read that the tokes for find my mac are stored in nvram and the recovery partition so a hard drive format is quite useless since the device would be still showing up in the "find" icloud account of the seller.
Best Answer
Computers, phones, and devices that are not currently logged in with a given Apple ID and specifically with the service Find My Mac / Find My iPhone enabled will show up as "Offline" in someone's iCloud account etc.
So, basically, if both of you have the same computer in your iCloud accounts with Find My Mac, only the person who is currently logged in can track it. If neither of you are logged in no one can track it. The only way he could track it at this point is if you knew his Apple ID and password and went into System Preferences > iCloud and set-up Find My Mac for him. It is up to him if he wants to keep a line in his iCloud.com menu under Find My Mac that has the "name" of the computer that was retrieved the last time he tracked it that will perpetually search and always fail to find your computer, and just say "Offline". You can't change that for him.
You're safe. With the computer wiped, his user account isn't present, and that's where the iCloud account data is stored. You do not need to track your computer to "block" him from doing. It's just up to you if you want to track it at all for yourself. He will never know where it is again.