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Why Tens of Thousands of Perfectly Good, Donated iPhones Are Shredded Every Year (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Tens of thousands of perfectly usable iPhones are scrapped each year by electronics recyclers because of the iPhone's "activation lock," according to a new analysis paper published Thursday. Earlier this year, we published a lengthy feature about the iPhone's activation lock (also called iCloud lock informally), an anti-theft feature that prevents new accounts from logging into iOS without the original user's iCloud password. This means that stolen phones can't be used by the person who stole it without the original owner's iCloud password (this lock can also be remotely enabled using Find My iPhone.) The feature makes the iPhone a less valuable theft target, but it has had unintended consequences, as well. iCloud lock has led to the proliferation of an underground community of hackers who use phishing and other techniques to steal iCloud passwords from the original owner and unlock phones. It's also impacted the iPhone repair, refurbishing, and recycling industry, because phones that are legitimately obtained often still have iCloud enabled, making that phone useless except for parts.
Between 2015 and 2018, the Wireless Alliance, the recycling company in question, collected roughly 6 million cell phones in donation boxes it set up around the country. Of those, 333,519 of them were iPhones deemed by the company to be "reusable." And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked and had to be stripped for parts and scrap metal. Last year, a quarter of all reusable iPhones it collected were activation locked. Allison Conwell, a coauthor of the CoPIRG report, told me in a phone call that the Wireless Alliance's findings show that many people donate their devices intending for them to be reused, but they're scrapped instead. In her paper, Conwell suggests that Apple should work with certified recyclers to unlock phones that have been legitimately donated (a survey of random devices conducted by the Wireless Alliance found that more than 90 percent of them had not been reported lost or stolen.) The paper suggests that Apple could either unlock phones that have not been reported lost or stolen for 30 days, or affirmatively ask users whether they had donated their previous phone and unlock it that way.
Between 2015 and 2018, the Wireless Alliance, the recycling company in question, collected roughly 6 million cell phones in donation boxes it set up around the country. Of those, 333,519 of them were iPhones deemed by the company to be "reusable." And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked and had to be stripped for parts and scrap metal. Last year, a quarter of all reusable iPhones it collected were activation locked. Allison Conwell, a coauthor of the CoPIRG report, told me in a phone call that the Wireless Alliance's findings show that many people donate their devices intending for them to be reused, but they're scrapped instead. In her paper, Conwell suggests that Apple should work with certified recyclers to unlock phones that have been legitimately donated (a survey of random devices conducted by the Wireless Alliance found that more than 90 percent of them had not been reported lost or stolen.) The paper suggests that Apple could either unlock phones that have not been reported lost or stolen for 30 days, or affirmatively ask users whether they had donated their previous phone and unlock it that way.
Apple has zero interest in recycling or repairing recovering data from any of their products, they only want to sell you a new device.
greed.... need I say more.
[($)]
The first thing that came into my mind is because iPhones are trash. :D
âoeMore than 90% not stolenâ
Hmmmmmm
Do a factory reset and you have to log into the original owners samsung account
"the proliferation of an underground community of hackers who use phishing and other techniques to steal iCloud passwords from the original owner and unlock phones"
For BeauHD and their favorite "news"blogs, any excuse to smear "hackers" will do. Any excuse at all.
Why not charge those employees for the iPhone unless they return them unlocked.
is a really high number. I highly doubt the the one's doing the recycling are returning those to individuals. And the fact that they want an unlock on phones that haven't been reported stolen for 30 days just means that they are going to wait 30 days before trying to unlock them. Screw those guys!
Out of all them bricks. The Mexico border looks good
Tim Cook and Apple sadly don't care. Any re-used iphone is a detriment to their stock price and therefore bottom line. Until us mere mortals stand up and fight we might as well be minions.. without the cool yellow heads, blue overalls and un-discernible language.
=P
Better yet, why is the phone not locked to a corporate account instead of their own personal account? You can log into both, but the device is only tied to the first. Seems like an admin error screwing them over from lack of correct practices.
Apple cares deeply about fucking you as a customer. A recused iPhone is someone who isn't smug and rich enough to deserve an iPhone. Fuck the environment, you must buy a new phone if you are to be one of the iPeople.
So much misinformation. Firstly any IT department worth it's salt will manage iOS devices with an MDM through Apple Business Manager and this problem goes away. If your company doesn't utilize MDM a quck phone call to Apple support, prove ownership, and they will unlock iCloud lock.
... my ass.
They have to deny it. Otherwise the government can order them to do it any time they want.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Apple refuses to unlock them even though they belong to the company. I'm surprised they are allowed to get away with this in a corporate environment
Er, if they are company owned, why are they not linked to the company Apple ID?
What you describe isn't company owned phones, but the company handing out money for employees to purchase employee owned phones.
For our company all iOS and Android devices the company purchases are delivered directly to IT (me) and the first things I do to iPhones/iPads are link it to our company apple ID followed by enrolling it to the corporate MDM. Only after that are they issued to employees.
Apple even has an "enterprise" setup where phones come pre-linked to an MDM/AppleID from the factory. Then they can ship them straight to the end user, and the new device shows up in the MDM inventory for provisioning before it is delivered.
Unfortunately the "enterprise" setup has a per-device / per-month fee to use it.
But the normal way of provisioning doesn't have any such fee, the only real costs are related to the devices coming through IT first.
somebody threw out a perfectly good white boy
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We only have thousands of apple devices, but we do MDM. Weird that you don't mention DEP at all.
We have a guy dedicated to The Problem you're trying to handwave away. The Problem that doesn't exist, doesn't happen. Yes, he makes quick (jesus christ are you for real) phone calls to Apple support. He fucking hates them. Staff managed to get their shit trapped behind your beloved wall? Sorry lady, you'll have your ipad back in a week if you're lucky. Fortunately you never use the thing. Actually, most of the people issued one at your site last year probably never turned it on twice - they never made it past signing in to the network.
I'm making some assumptions here. I suppose it's possible you don't actually have your nose in the air, it just seems that way because you're on your knees gargling APPL.
Shit, now I can't close with any "eat a dick" remark.
He hates making the calls*
He actually used to be as zealous as any fanboy. Decline probably started back around osx10.10, the coffee table book was what finally broke his faith, for some reason.
any more questions?
Similar with Android FRP.
333,519 of them were iPhones deemed by the company to be "reusable." And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked... the Wireless Alliance found that more than 90 percent of them had not been reported lost or stolen
Working as intended?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
We have hundreds of iPhones returned by former employees that are unusable because of this. Apple refuses to unlock them even though they belong to the company.
Sounds like the company needs to learn how to properly deploy corporate-managed iPhones.
#DeleteChrome
I wonder if Apple has a way to unlock them. When they swap phones out for warranty reasons, for example, they refurb the old one and give it to someone else. The one you get as a warranty replacement is often a refurb.
So are they just throwing the locked ones away, or replacing the motherboard, or do they have some way to unlock them?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The number of iPhones discarded due to this problem, 33,000, works out to 3.1 cubic meters of waste (assuming they are all modern size).
There may be a fair bit of value there, with exotic elements and whatnot, but it's hardly an environmental disaster. It's way less waste volume than you would get from, say, demolishing a Blockbuster Video store and replacing it with a Mattress Firm.
Sounds like you need to fire the people doing bookkeeping. Yes, its slow and annoying, but Apple very much DOES unlock corporate devices.
Please excuse my ignorance, but wouldn't any sane person do a factory reset before donating an unwanted phone and would this remove any locks on an iPhone?
You are lying or your IT department is inept.
Apple specifically has a program for corporate, mass-purchased phones. Enroll them in the MDM program and corporate IT can remove the lock no matter which employee locks the phone.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Apple has a program specifically for companies with corporate owned iPhones. The person who posted that they have "hudreds" of locked iPhones is either a troll or has the worst IT department, as well as the worst CTO, on the planet.
Corporate iPhones are registered with the company and no matter the personal account signed onto the phone, corporate IT can remove the lock any time they want.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Apple WANTS people to scrap their old iPhones, because they want to sell New phones to everyone.
It's been the driving force behind their No Repair policy, and why they are so Adamant on blocking any Right to Repair legislation that gets attempted.
As their new phone sales have been flagging, they are getting desperate to have old phones cycled out so that their new phones get sold.
-
Most of the recycling problem would be solved by people disabling their iCloud service before donating. That, or "Factory Rest" them beforehand, as suggested in many other posts.
-
How about a campaign geared toward recycling phones?
"How To Reset" info on a collection website, perhaps?
That could make a difference as well.
I had a company iPad unlocked - was a bit drawn out and annoying.
Employee left under a cloud as it were and had "forgotten" the password, so it's on my desk.
Seems Apple somehow put me into consumer not corporate, that's what they blamed it on.
I had supplied all the proof of ownership all that stuff and it didn't get resolved, I did get pretty narky on the phone at the end of it all.
Really was a PITA though.. real time waster.
"but it has had unintended consequences"
Do you really think they are unintended?
I have strong reasons to believe they are the primary motive behind this lock, not theft protection.
Are you considering the resources it takes to replace that working appliance? Some estimates place one smartphone to consume an average of 1 gigajoule of energy and 13 tons of water to manufacture.
https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
There should be a stiff up-front charge on every iPhone to pay for scrapping. Perhaps 30% .
Unless you put them in supervised mode or enrolled in DEP then this is hard to avoid.
This sort of problem can creep up, it wasn't an issue a few years ago before the cloud lock.
Other things change as well like the 2 factor authentication, The cloud lock wasn't so bad if you had control of the email address, but since they've been pushing 2 factor this isn't sufficient to unlock.
This sort of stuff really hit smaller organisations hardest those that are a bit too small to have an IT department to watch this.
The function serves its purpose in terms of reducing theft of people's property. The problem is that people don't know that they need to unregister their iPhone from their iCloud account before they sell the phone. Really, that's all you have to do - log in on your iCloud account and remove the device from there, and it's no longer tied to your account and can be repurposed by someone else and their iCloud account without any hassle.
Actually they will unlock them with proof of purchase information (a PO). Source: We've done it at work numerous times.
We have hundreds of iPhones returned by former employees that are unusable because of this. Apple refuses to unlock them even though they belong to the company.
Sounds like the company needs to learn how to properly deploy corporate-managed iPhones.
Yes. Both Android and iOS provide key escrow services for corp-managed devices, so the corporation can unlock them without the employee's help. Android goes a step further and offers the ability for user-owned devices to set up a "work profile" which contains all corporate apps and data, and gives enterprises the ability to manage or delete the work profile apps, but no access to the personal profile or data.
If some company is suffering because it fails to use the enterprise features available, that's its own fault. This stuff has been available in mobile OSes for some time.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
From experience managed devices are also a PITA for recyclers/second hand dealers because:
1. The device makes no attempt to make it obvious the device is managed going as far as to put indicators in a different place than the existing activation locks people know to check for.
2. No online documentation suggests checking if a device is managed before.
buying/selling/trading/donating so people who work in secondhand goods get bitten by it at least once.
But for the control it gives you it's freaking awesome for companies and other institutions that issue phones.
Need a device unlocked? *click* need a device remotely reset? *click* want to remotely reroute its web traffic through your own servers for monitoring, filtering or security? *click*
It can't be removed by the person who has the phone and any apps you specify will automatically be reloaded whenever the device is reset for a consistent deployment.
I don't know why anyone issuing phones wouldn't be taking advantage of that.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The iCloud activation lock applies to the Apple Watch as well. In my town our state has a warehouse store where they sell government surplus to the public. They also sell items confiscated and lost at airports. Apple Watches turn up on occasion, and I purchased two. The first one was activation locked. There is nothing I can do to make use of this watch. The watch was lost, held by the airport and then the government for many months and never claimed. I bought it legitimately and legally from the government.
The most annoying part is not only can't I use it, but I also cannot contact the person who owns it. Their email address is partially displayed - you know, the k*****@gmail.com type thing. It just seems there must be some manner in which to handle these cases. It would have to be done through some organization that mediates between the owner and the person / entity that is in possession of the device (to prevent various kinds of abuse).
Better known as 318230.
Why not just have signs at the donation boxes asking the people donating the phones to unlock and wipe them? Seems like this is just an example of poor PR by the charity groups asking for phones.
>Sounds like the company needs to learn how to properly deploy corporate-managed iPhones.
Pretend you said "car" instead of "iPhone."
One environmental law we need is: When you own something, you have the right to use it.
A manufacturer MUST unlock it for free on demand.
A manufacturer MUST NOT disable legacy systems.
A software company MUST NOT charge extra for environmentally friendly features, like Multi-Point Services in Windows.
A software company MUST reactivate all legally owned software for free on demand.
The penalty for any violation should be 10x the MSRP of the product, or 10x the highest known selling price of the product, whichever is more.
And a test: FUCK THE PIGS!
Through what, a payroll deduction? Say hello to a Glassdoor score of 1.5/5.0. May not even be legal. Either way, that would be a terrible idea; penny wise and pound foolish.
People here are ignoring the fact that pretty much everything except the battery, the logic board, and the Touch ID parts of an iPhone get reused.
Jesus Christ, you'd think from reading this that Apple literally shreds locked iPhones. In fact, iPhones probably are recycled more than any other phone because of the fact that its parts are ultra-valuable.
If your company has deployed enough iPhones to have hundreds returned by former employees, I'm gobsmacked that you're not using an MDM tool of some sort. And if you are using MDM and it's not letting you unlock your company's phones, you're not doing it right.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
We have hundreds of iPhones returned by former employees that are unusable because of this. Apple refuses to unlock them even though they belong to the company. I'm surprised they are allowed to get away with this in a corporate environment but I guess the RDF is still strong enough because they keep buying them.
I'm surprised they are allowed to get away with this in your corporate environment, but whoever's making the purchasing decisions is obviously either corrupt or stupid (there's no third option.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We have hundreds of iPhones returned by former employees that are unusable because of this.
A friend of mine complained because she has about half a dozen unusable phones. There are some very simple steps that the employee has to do before returning his phone. I don't know what the legal situation is if the employee doesn't do that. But also, you can call Apple to sell you phones that are bound to your company. The company can reset them at any time, and they can't be reset to be used outside the company.
I wonder if Apple has a way to unlock them. When they swap phones out for warranty reasons, for example, they refurb the old one and give it to someone else. The one you get as a warranty replacement is often a refurb.
They ask you to erase your phone before exchanging it. They will also strongly advise you to make a backup first, so your new phone can be restored quite quickly. If your phone is not in a state where you can erase it (like if it doesn't react to any keypress), that's bad luck for Apple.
Where I work, we used to deploy new iPads to all new full-time employees, when they started a division that developed software apps for the platform. We wound up with a number of useless paperweights when employees turned them in upon leaving but neglected to follow our instructions to unlock them for us first.
Since then, sure -- we implemented tools to manage them ourselves with MDM, so that problem is behind us. (Heck, we stopped issuing them out anyway - because we restructured things and no longer do that app development.)
But I agree that the locked devices create a lot of senseless e-waste. No matter how simple Apple makes the process for someone to deauthorize/unlock it before before passing it on to the next person -- there are going to be a lot of situations where that step just doesn't happen.
It's frustrating that Apple (and for that matter, all the Android phones that do the same thing with Google logins) assume "Theft!" as the immediate go-to answer. I'd prefer theft to be something NOT assumed until they're told one happened. EG. Keep the current system in place BUT allow anyone to call in or email the right people to request it be unlocked for re-activation. If there's not a flag on that device's serial number saying someone already reported it stolen, do the unlock.
Pawn shops handled this, long ago, by requiring you give them your drivers' license to photocopy and keep on file whenever you pawn something. Then, if it turns out you gave them stolen merchandise, they know who to go back to. Apple, Samsung and others could do that same -- keeping your info on file as the one who requested the unlock.
There is similar partitioning on ios. The firm I work for can remote erase my phone, etc
"because phones that are legitimately obtained often still have iCloud enabled, making that phone useless except for parts. "
That's exactly why we like it. If you steal our phone, you'll have an old battery and a replacement screen and if it's mine, the screen will be cracked on top.
There is similar partitioning on ios. The firm I work for can remote erase my phone, etc
Remote erase your whole phone, or just the work part? I hadn't heard that iOS had acquired anything comparable to the Android work profile, and some quick googling just turned up comments about how it was needed. Am I missing something or are you mistaken?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
>Sounds like the company needs to learn how to properly deploy corporate-managed iPhones.
Pretend you said "car" instead of "iPhone."
So your company allows employees to change the keys on their company car? Or are you just pretending to understand the issue?
We have hundreds of iPhones returned by former employees that are unusable because of this.
But also, you can call Apple to sell you phones that are bound to your company. The company can reset them at any time, and they can't be reset to be used outside the company.
Someone else upthread said there is a recurring fee for this. In a world where non-corporate phones are cheaper to purchase and do a one-time setup that comes out much cheaper and with no extra monthly costs to gain that level of control, that'll be the path of least resistance.
Sadly, there's even lower resistance in allowing all staff to carry whatever phone they want in a Bring-your-own-device setup. I work in tech and many employees are perfectly happy because they can upgrade their property any time they succumb to the latest shiny fad instead of having to wait in line for their 3-year corporate replacement phone to be approved. And with personal phones, people feel at ease blocking all calls out of hours, which isn't so easy to justify for the phone the employer is funding on a monthly basis to keep you in under the always-reachable yoke.
You are lying or your IT department is inept.
Apple specifically has a program for corporate, mass-purchased phones. Enroll them in the MDM program and corporate IT can remove the lock no matter which employee locks the phone.
It has little to do with incompetence. There is a reoccurring cost for this.
You can take an iOS device with the proof of purchase to any Apple store, and they will remove the iCloud activation lock.
It's not at all hard for Apple to solve this...when someone goes to donate their phone just allow for a complete reset that requires iCloud password to completely reset the phone...how freaking hard is that?
That is exactly what my former company, which treated its employees like adults instead of overgrown children, did. You better believe I returned my iPhone after factory reset, unlocked, lest I be docked £500 for a 2 year old iPhone from my final paycheck.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Is the pile of useless phones that now have to be replaced not worth the MDM cost?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson