I sold my iPhone 12, and before the sale, I did a factory reset on the device. It looked like it was brand new, displaying the 'Hello' screen in various languages. However, the buyer recently reached out with a photo of the phone asking for my Apple ID login or needing me to remove it from 'Find My iPhone'. I plan to remove it from 'Find My' soon, but I thought that a factory reset would automatically take care of that. Is it safe for me to go ahead and remove it from 'Find My', or do I need to get the phone back? The buyer's message says the phone is 'locked to owner', and I'm worried about my data being compromised. Can someone help me out?
3 Answers
Yeah, it's safe to remove it from 'Find My iPhone'. Doing that will unlock the phone for your buyer. It’s common for this to happen if you didn’t log out of iCloud before the factory reset. Just go ahead and do it!
Typically, if you reset the settings and data, the phone should ask for your Apple ID password to remove 'Find My'. It won’t just let you bypass that without logging in. Guessing that is why it's showing as locked.
That makes sense. I’m just really worried I didn’t think this through enough.
A factory reset doesn’t automatically remove iCloud accounts. You should always log out of iCloud and then do the reset. Since you didn’t, your account might still be tied to the phone even after you remove it from 'Find My'.
So does that mean my account will remain there after I remove it from 'Find My'?
But I didn’t log out, I just reset it. Is it really okay to do this?