Apple’s Private Find My People Reversed to Decrypt Live Shared Locations on Linux

A security researcher has successfully reverse-engineered Apple’s private Find My People protocol, demonstrating that a Linux machine can register with Apple’s internal services, receive an existing location-sharing key, and decrypt a friend’s live location without ever touching a Mac or iPhone.

The project began innocently: the researcher wanted to build Discord geofence alerts using location data a friend was already sharing via Apple’s Find My app. What looked like a simple authenticated API call turned into roughly a week of reverse-engineering Apple’s private device-identity and messaging infrastructure, since no prior open-source project had fully replicated the flow.

Using decompilations of Apple’s fmfd , findmylocated , and searchpartyd daemons alongside open-source tools like FindMy.py and pypush, the researcher rebuilt the entire pipeline field by field.