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That's it, I'm disabling "Find my mac". I guess it wouldn't work anyways if a thief is far away from my home or work wifi. So in essence, it's a remote wipe backdoor for when the device is in my possession, and useless if it's stolen.

FileVault2 should take care of the theft problem anyways.

Too bad you can't partially-enable Find my mac for the location service, while disabling the remote wipe and lock services.

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Instead of only disabling Find my Mac, please make sure your backups are functional and enabled. That way, if your machine fails or gets wiped (whether it's by you, a thief or someone with your iCloud password), you can still recover everything.

Sure. But should something like this happen, I'd prefer to not waste time having to sit through a complete reinstall before I can start damage control by changing passwords online, etc.

That's what live CDs are for. If your system gets owned, you can't trust it anymore.

I don't think getting hold of the iCloud password would let anyone "own" my mac. (The only things they should be able to do with that would be messing with my synced address book, notes and photostream - and if "find my mac" was enabled, perform a remote wipe).

Use FileVault 2 and remote wipe is no longer necessary.

On current Macs, a live USB stick might be a better idea than a live CD. Or even better a bootable backup created with Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) or SuperDuper.

Think of the trade off: what's the likelihood that you won't be able to find a computer...ANY computer...to login to your accounts...versus the likelihood that someone can compromise the stolen computer's entire HD?

(this is less of an issue if you're encrypting everything)

Why do you think it wouldn't work if the thief is far away from your home or work?

How would it connect to the iCloud services? The mac doesn't have a built-in 3G connection, so the only way it can go online is through previously-stored wifi associations.

my solution to this is to have an auto-login non-admin account on the machine that's not my own account.

Give them enough access to get on the internet & use the machine. Keep my files stored in my own account.

I enabled the guest account on my Mac, but auto-login in non-admin account is a good idea.

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