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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.
Do a factory reset and you have to log into the original owners samsung account
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
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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.
or reported lost, who knows what the %s are.
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
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
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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% .
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.
A sane person would, yes, and that would unregister the phone from their iCloud account and the phone would be free to use by a new owner. People are not sane, however.
Any eventual lock the owner has enabled is removed and deleted in entirety when they unregister the device from their iCloud account. That's all you have to do to prevent this problem when giving/selling the phone to someone. Nothing more. It's that simple.
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.
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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.
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?
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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