App Leads Police to iPhone Thief

By Ian Bell July 22, 2010

A man accused of swiping an Apple iPhone out of a woman’s hand in San Francisco may have been shocked when police found him only nine minutes later. It turns out the phone had been tracking his every move.

The iPhone was being used to test a new, real-time GPS tracking application, and the woman holding it was an intern for the software’s maker, Mountain View-based Covia Labs.

Covia CEO David Khan had sent the intern into the street to demonstrate the software. Police say Horatio Toure snatched it and sped away on a bicycle.

Khan was watching a live map of the phone’s location on a computer and says he was immediately struck by how quickly the image began moving down the street.

Police arrested Toure nine minutes later, and the intern identified him as the thief.

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