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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.
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.
An iCloud lock associates the serial number of an iPhone to an iCloud account.
No matter which way you erase the device, as soon as the device connects to the internet (this cannot be skipped, either through cellular, wifi, or wired to a computer), the first thing that happens is the device connects to the Apple servers and sends the serial number and checks if it's locked or not.
There are videos showing iCloud lock removals by reprogramming the chips that have the serial to a different number, but that involves completely disassembling the device and desoldering a specific chip from the logic board, then reprogramming it with a very specific piece of hardware. I'm not sure if that still works, the last video I saw of it was an iPhone 6S from years ago.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
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.
Yeah, but unlike Samsung phones iPhones are secure.
I'd say that Samsung phones are roughly as secure as iPhones, though neither is quite as secure as the Google Pixel. Of course, security is a multi-dimensional discrete space, not a one-dimensional continuum, so any comparisons of this sort are of questionable validity without a precisely-defined threat model. However, if we use the results of public competitions as our metric, Samsung and Apple phones get cracked with roughly equal frequency, while Pixel phones fare much better (Pixel has stood unbeaten three years running in Mobile Pwn2Own, for example, while both Apple and Samsung were cracked every year).
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