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It's Time To Start Taking Stolen Phones Seriously
itwbennett writes "'Find My iPhone' is neat, but it's time for smartphone makers and carriers to stop pretending their anti-theft measures are anything more than minimum viable products, says blogger Kevin Purdy. He's not the first to point this out: As reported in Slashdot, 'NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said overall crime in New York City was up 3.3% in 2012 due to iPhone, iPad and other Apple device thefts.' And now San Francisco and New York attorneys general are calling a 'Smartphone Summit' where representatives from Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft are due to meet and discuss the implementation of a industry-wide 'kill switch' system."
When a phone is stolen, another phone gets purchased. Reducing phone thefts will cut into new phone sales!
After a $150 deductible
Burn FAT not OIL
The phone is bait. It should commonly lead you to criminals who have done other illegal things. A super hero who retrieves phones just so he can honeypot get to the criminals would be legit. All he'd need to do is use GPS, then call the phone when he's in range and have a conversation with his prey before closing the distance and kicking tail.
I understand why real cops wouldn't want to retrieve phones. It would be easy to spot, but they would be encountering possibly violent criminals more often. No one wants to die even if they're doing their job more effectively.
God spoke to me
They said that in the article: It gets sold to a carrier which is not querying the US version of the Stolen Phone database.
We need something like DNS but then for IMEI numbers. .imei :-)
bash$
You could have stopped right there. That alone would have negated a lot of the incentive of stealing phones in the first place.
That rings far too much like "guilty until proven innocent".
It's stolen property... handle it identically to that. The possessor surrenders it to the authorities at their own expense.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft are due to meet and discuss the implementation of a industry-wide 'kill switch' system."
Soon to be highjacked by the job-creating content industry.
Oops, sorry, looks like you'd better stop pirating Mickey Mouse from 75 years ago if you want to make that emergency call!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Yes, the phonemaker gets more revenue. However, the money used to fund those replacements comes from an increased levy on all phone purchasers who have coverage. So everyone with coverage pays more for phones. The extra money that everyone pays for phones means less money spent on all other possible purchases. So Apple's revenue increase is Krogers' or Target's or Shell's decrease.
We usually disregard widely-distributed costs and look at local effects. This is especially true of politicians. But those effects are real and directly affect the aggregate economy numbers.
It's really for stolen phones .. just like the kill switch for the internet was for emergency purposes. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cutting off people's means of communicating effectively with each other.
Don't be asinine. Your cellphone can already be tracked, tapped, disabled, folded, spindled and mutilated. What this is about is centralising and sharing information about stolen phones so that the utility of stolen phones diminishes to the point that you walking around with an iPhone doesn't look like an easy 200$ target to ne'er-do-wells.
Because there are so many phones stolen and so many more serious crimes to investigate that the police don't give a crap about your stolen cell phone. You must not have ever had one stolen, because almost anyone who has (myself included) can confirm this complete lack of interest ;)
If the police cared, the technology is already there to catch many phone thieves. But everyone knows they won't bother. It's much easier (and nearly free) just to make the phone a brick to discourage it in the first place than spend MANY thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on investigation, arrest, booking, court hearing/trial, and imprisonment for a $500 piece of electronics.