California To Require Kill Switches To Deter Phone Theft
Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - 11:39 AM
Consumer advocates have, for years, argued that if phone owners
could brick phones remotely, it would deter phone theft. And phone
theft is a big problem. In San Francisco, nearly half of all robberies are cell phone related. In New York City, where 40 percent of all robberies are phone related, Mayor Bloomberg blamed a 2012 rise in crime squarely on the theft of Apple products. On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a "kill switch" bill into law.
The bill requires all phones sold after July 1, 2015 to include
a function that allows the remote destruction of stolen phones, so that
they then can't be resold. Critics say that thieves will figure out how
to undo the kill switch, or worse, that hackers could just start bricking phones left and right for the lulz.
California's law is the strictest yet and could set the agenda for
other states in the future, so it will be interesting to see just how
well it ends up working.
More in:
-
Alex Goldman
Alex Goldman is a producer for On the Media and the co-host/creator of TLDR. He is on twitter here. Subscribe to the TLDR podcast here.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered