Creating a policy to turn off Find My iCloud settings involves the use of Swif MDM software. Swif MDM allows organizations to remotely manage devices and enforce policies that are required for the security and compliance of the devices being used by their employees.
Why do you want to turn on Find My?
A top Apple sysadmin mentioned to us that he would stay away from Activation Lock. He disables any prestige enrollments with ADE, and he also sends out device policies to disable Find My. He noted that with it on, if a device gets stolen, it becomes a paperweight and you may never see it again. With it not locked, it makes it possible for someone to wipe, but then it gets re-enrolled and could notify IT, thereby giving them a chance to recover it. Many people don't think of it that way, and we can see now why this top Apple admin chose not to enable a user-based activation lock through MDM despite the security layer for it.
Here's a step-by-step process to create a policy to turn off Find My iCloud settings:
Create a new policy > New policy from scratch > macOS > Find My policy
Name the Find My policy for an easy-to-remember name
Check the box next to
Disable Find My Mac iCloud Setting when Find My is disabled.
Notify device user to turn off Find My
Select the Mac devices or Groups you want to apply the policy to. You can also create a device group in the next step. Continue to finish the setup.
After creation, you can view the details by clicking the policy row.
Note, when enabling both settings (Disable Find My Mac iCloud Setting when Find My is disabled and Sending notifications to disable Find My), sending notifications to disable Find My will have a higher priority. Swif will send a notification to the device owner to turn off Find My on the Mac app first before deploying the policy to disable Find My.
Only after the device owner has disabled Find My on their devices, we will only deploy the policy to disable Find My. We don't want to disable Find My settings before the device owner disables Find My.
This is before disabling Find My settings.
This is after disabling Find My settings. You can see the Find My setting is On and won't be able to change it if we disable the Find My settings before it turns off.
If device users have trouble turning off Find My from system settings > iCloud, we can do it from icloud.com. The pre-requisite is the device needs to be offline when turning off Find My on icloud.com. For more details, please visit https://help.swif.ai/en/articles/6965609-how-to-turn-off-find-my