Prey is an excellent Anti-theft application developed by Tomas Pollak a Chilean programmer that helps you to track and recover stolen Laptops, tablets, and Phones.
This application enables you to track and control the lost device remotely and make them unusable to people who are using your device.
The software keeps an eye on the culprit and collects all kinds of information, how they are using your device.
Prey installs an agent on your device which runs in the background and at regular intervals sends a request to your dashboard (account) whether to gather information, do any action or stay asleep.
If your device is lost or stolen, you can mark it on Prey’s dashboard as missing and the device will start collecting data to help you track it down.
The app discreetly gathers lots of information about the missing device and its current operator.As soon as the device comes online, the software will use nearby Wi-Fi access
points to interpolate the location on your device.
It also gathers information such as the public IP address of the network the device is connected to. In addition to its location, the app also takes a screenshot of the desktop.Prey will also secretly takes a photo of the thief with the device built-in webcam.
Coming to features, the geofencing feature Prey’s Dashboard helps you can mark personalized zones on the map and ask the software to send you an email whenever one of the devices assigned to a zone
leaves or enters the area.
Actions option in the dashboard lists several activities you can perform remotely on the device.The Alarm option sounds a loud alarm from your missing device to help you locate it if it’s nearby. It lists four different sounds that will be blared out from the speakers on the device for 30 seconds.
Then there’s the Alert option that displays an alert message on the screen of the missing device. You can use it to send a 250 character-long notification that’ll be displayed on the desktop
of the device.
If these don’t work to discourage the thief, you can use the Lock option to prevent the computer from being used until a password is entered. You can also sound the alarm after locking the
device to prevent the culprit from muting the speakers.
Prey works on almost all popular operating systems including Android, iOS, Linux, MacOS, and Windows.
So you can use this to track mobile devices as well as laptops.The free version allows you to track 3 devices, to track more devices you can opt paid plans which start from USD $5 per month.
Download the software for your device from developer page.
Tranks for the reference Ramakanth!
Tamás, how do you *uninstall* this on the Mac? I cannot find instructions anywhere. The thing just keeps taking pictures of me!
(Help!)
From the Prey website:
In Mac or Linux you need to remove the folder where you installed Prey (by default /usr/share/prey) and aditionally the respective crontab line for executing Prey (root’s by default). You can do so in the terminal:
$ sudo rm -Rf /usr/share/prey
$ (sudo crontab -l | grep -v prey) | sudo crontab –
hth