Access to user accounts is not disabled. If the thief has the password he will still be able to log in and if the Mac is set up to automatically log in the thief will be able to access user accounts even without a password. (It is however, possible to remotely lock the Mac even if it is set up to log in automatically. You can also send messages to the Mac, wipe it or locate it.)
If the thief doesn’t know the password the only thing he can do (short of, say, replacing the HDD) is log into the guest account, i.e. restart to Safari on the recovery partition.
I am by no means an expert on this but maybe this is somehow related to the new full disk encryption? Does it make sense to not allow thieves to boot from the encrypted partition?
Like always with computers this is not watertight – at least as far as getting your Mac back is concerned. (Full disk encryption – which is optional – probably protects your data reasonably well.) There are ways to circumvent “Find my Mac”. The good thing is that thieves are usually not very bright.
If the thief doesn’t know the password the only thing he can do (short of, say, replacing the HDD) is log into the guest account, i.e. restart to Safari on the recovery partition.
I am by no means an expert on this but maybe this is somehow related to the new full disk encryption? Does it make sense to not allow thieves to boot from the encrypted partition?
Like always with computers this is not watertight – at least as far as getting your Mac back is concerned. (Full disk encryption – which is optional – probably protects your data reasonably well.) There are ways to circumvent “Find my Mac”. The good thing is that thieves are usually not very bright.