Save Our Smartphones!

The Associated Press said last Thursday that New York and San Francisco Prosecutors will announce a program people have dubbed, Save Our Smart-phones.

The new initiative will bring together politicians, consumer advocates and law enforcement officials across the United States to fight the increasing surge of smartphone thefts. The group wants to put pressure on manufacturing companies who produce smart devices to reduce the market for stolen phones. One goal, that has been mentioned, is to set up a “kill switch” that would render all such phones inoperative.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón were hosting a “smart-phone summit” with representatives from Apple, Google/Motorola, Samsung and Microsoft on Thursday June 13.

“The epidemic of violent street crime involving the theft and resale of mobile devices is a very real and growing threat in communities all across America,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement. “According to reports, roughly 113 smart-phones are stolen or lost each minute in the United states, with too many of those thefts turning violent.” Last year the Federal Communications Commission has said that Mobile phone thefts are involved in almost one in three robberies across the USA.

During Apple’s recent developers conference, WWDC, the company unveiled a new security feature that is to be released as part of the next incarnation of their mobile operating system, iOS 7. The current operating system iOS6 has no such feature, but does have a clever application called Find My iPhone, which allows an owner to wipe all data on a lost or stolen iPhone remotely. The new system called Activation Lock, which is incorporated into the operating system itself, will take that security a step further by requiring the original owner’s Apple ID and password in order to access a stolen/lost/wiped iPhone.

Once again, Apple are at the cutting edge of technological innovation.  The question remains, is it enough?  “113 smart phones…per minute” I don’t think so.

SOURCE: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57589115-94/prosecutors-team-up-to-combat-smartphone-thefts/

[Image via digitaltrends]