California Rejects 'Kill Switch' Requirement Legislation for Smartphones

SnarkyBear said:

I don't know if I want a 'Kill Switch' available in the phones. I am not normally paranoid, but it seems like something governments would use against their people. I imagine that the Arab Spring a few years ago, which relied heavily on phones to tweet, Facebook, and text each other, might have had different results if their oppressive leaders could convince the phone companies to "kill" the phones of suspected protestors.

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I was originally a proponent of a law mandating these kill switches, but the more I thought about it, the more I got concerned about exactly this type of intrusion. Note that the iOS Activation Lock solution is met with "cautious optimism." Why? It does everything that a vendor and a consumer can conceivably do to protect their data and deter theft, short of putting an explosive charge in the thing and detonating the phone while it's in the thief's hands, blowing their limbs off.

The only reasoning I have for the continued skepticism is that it just isn't a government-controlled solution.

Also: the feds are already using the possibility of kill switches as justification for wanting warrantless searches of people's smartphones. So there is absolutely a downside to this.

Activation Lock only works if the thieves know about it. If you generalize that most thieves aren't the brightest and they therefore don't know about Activation Lock, they're still going to steal the phone and then there will just be a very frustrated thief with a shiny brick and and even more frustrated iPhone owner.

Apple needs to advertise this feature more robustly so that the word spreads and the incentive to steal iPhones is diminished.

It won't do much good anyway unless they crack down on people freely selling activation-locked iPhones on ebay.

tylerjamison said:

Activation Lock only works if the thieves know about it. If you generalize that most thieves aren't the brightest and they therefore don't know about Activation Lock, they're still going to steal the phone and then there will just be a very frustrated thief with a shiny brick and and even more frustrated iPhone owner.

Apple needs to advertise this feature more robustly so that the word spreads and the incentive to steal iPhones is diminished.

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Or a year or two will go by and it will be common knowledge that "phones stop working if you steal them, so sell quick or don't bother". Thieves often steal opportunistically, but they still weigh the risks like anything else.

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JayLenochiniMac said:

It won't do much good anyway unless they crack down on people freely selling activation-locked iPhones on ebay.

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That's really painful if true.

wikiverse said:

There is no difference between a 'nanny state' and a 'corporate nanny'. If anything, most of the time the nanny state is trying to protect you, your interests, and your freedom from the corporate nanny who has significantly more influence over your information, decision making and purchases.

Corporations do not care about you. They only care about your money.

This is the government legislating to give users control over their devices, to protect the user's data and deter theft.

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Nobody is saying that corporations are benevolent. However, there are certain types of issues that are most efficiently dealt with via market mechanisms. Would it be a good idea for the government to protect you by regulating the price of everything in the grocery store? Or to regulate how fast MacDonald's should be able to make you a sandwich? No. To enforce such fine-grained micro-management would require an enormously expensive and abusively powerful government that would cost a fortune to run and also stifle innovation. Rather, the government need only set up a market and ensure that it is functional and market pressures will force companies to do the right thing whether they want to or not.

In the case of smartphones, there is already a thriving market and consumers can get what they want in terms of phone features. Fine-grained government control of individual features such as anti-theft features simply isn't required. If there were a role for government, it would be at the market level, for example by reforming the patent process or implementing net neutrality. It would not be this kind of silly micro-management.

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tylerjamison said:

Activation Lock only works if the thieves know about it. If you generalize that most thieves aren't the brightest and they therefore don't know about Activation Lock, they're still going to steal the phone and then there will just be a very frustrated thief with a shiny brick and and even more frustrated iPhone owner.

Apple needs to advertise this feature more robustly so that the word spreads and the incentive to steal iPhones is diminished.

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Most phones aren't stolen by first-time thieves- they will learn and word will get round in such circles. The people who really need educating are the fools who have their phone set to never require a password and the those who haven't yet upgraded to iOS 7, the latter group seems to be quite over-represented on these forums.

Yakuzahi said:

In California, they suspend your license when you reach 4 points; silly but true.

But listen to this: if you get a DUI, you get 2 points!

If you are involved in a HIT AND RUN, you get 2 points. THEY'RE GIVING YOU THE OPPORTUNITY to DUI AGAIN AND TO HIT AND RUN AGAIN!

So why do you expect the Kill Switch bill to pass?

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It's not that simple.

As someone who got mugged at knifepoint in LA for my iPhone - I'm all for legislation to deter theft.

May not be perfect, but these dudes who mugged me got to take my iPhone to the nearest AT&T store and use my iPhone for FREE.

That is just not right.

I know they have taken some steps since then, but any hurdles to make it more difficult to unlock and resell if reported stolen by the legitimate owner seem good to me.

Even if it deters theft by 1% I am all for it.

wikiverse said:

There is no difference between a 'nanny state' and a 'corporate nanny'.

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That's incorrect on so many levels I almost don't know where to start... You can argue the pros and cons of each, but "no difference"??

Eh... Probably not worth the effort...

proline said:

Good. The features of a smartphone are best left between companies and their customers.

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Not really. Some things need global solutions. That's why we have governments in the first place. People walking around with expensive phones that can't be locked puts me at risk of robbery whether my phone is secure or not. A thief is not going to test a phone's security before stealing it, he's just going to go with the probabilities.

Selling as parts

Some parts could be sold, but as far as I recall, the touch id is locked to the enclave of the CPU, maybe new parts could be locked like that.

I like Apple's initiative on the anti-theft measure.

jdpierce21 said:

I was thinking the same exact thing when I read this. It doesn't matter that you would have to part out the phone. Most thieves don't have a clue on how to do that. So, the risk now does not outweigh the reward.

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Personally I think this is about AT&T and Verizon having deep pockets for lobbyist. They don't want this bill. They see a stolen iPhone as a new customer.

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Stolen phone is also a new phone for another customer, so I cant see the argument here.

AT&T, Verizon, etc alrdy can kill your phone by locking the sim card, so the conspiracy paranoia that the government can kill someones phone is no sense.

There are no serious arguments not to support this bill or similiar bill that obligate the phone manufacturer to include a special app for killing the device linked to the legitimate owner.

proline said:

Indeed. Pressure from customers as well as the PR effects of public shaming from various individuals and police forces would have led to this type of feature without government intervention making said intervention a redundant waste of money. Meanwhile governments sit by silently on issues where they actually could make a difference, such as net neutrality. People need to learn the proper place for government intervention.

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But consumers as a group don't apply this sort of pressure. Consumers want to think about flashy screens and fancy features, not what happens when they get held up with a knife at their neck. Consumer pressure often fails to push for things that populations really need because individual self-interest usually trumps the interests of the population. 'Why should I pay for this?' It's why tall people can't ride a plane in comfort.

Measures like this are like vaccines. They are designed to protect the population as a whole, not individuals. I could make for myself a phone that explodes if the user has the wrong fingerprint, but that wouldn't protect me from theft at all. I'd have to make that feature widespread amongst phone owners before it had any deterrent effect. And in that scenario, even those who didn't install (or pay for) my security feature benefit equally without any loss or risk, so the incentive for individuals is in the reverse direction to what is necessary for the population's good.

QCassidy352 said:

That's incorrect on so many levels I almost don't know where to start... You can argue the pros and cons of each, but "no difference"??

Eh... Probably not worth the effort...

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There really is no difference between a government trying to influence your behaviour/purchasing decisions and a corporation doing it.

Either way you lose the ability to make a real choice for yourself.

The government imposing a 'kill switch' to 'protect' user's data and devices from people that might seek to cause harm, is no different, say, than Apple imposing an 'app-store only' app download policy to 'protect' users data and devices from people that might seek to cause harm.

In both instances, you have no choice... but the government doesn't benefit financially from restricting your choice, Apple does.

In both instances, the government or the corporation are trying to exert influence over you by dictating how you should use your device.

mrsir2009 said:

If their customers want it, companies will do it on their own without being forced to. And if company doesn't implement it, then customers are free to leave for the competition.

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Yeah, if iOS didn't already have the remote wipe/find my iPhone feature, people could have voted with their wallets by going with another iOS phone maker. Just like folks not happy with Apple's Macintosh hardware lineup are free to buy from another OSX computer maker.

Next thing we know Calafonia is trying to get all phones being sold in the state to have a finger print scanner

acslater017 said:

What use is hardware if it can't be used beyond a movie prop? At least in San Francisco, the market is for quickly flipping a device and selling it for a few bucks. From now on, anyone involved in the iPhone black market is a sucker if they purchase an iPhone without checking its functionality. Now if they want to make money, they have to take it to someone who knows what to do with camera modules, flash chips, etc.?

Am I missing something, or doesn't this still seriously deflate the incentive to steal an iPhone? Even if not 100% of users enable it, I feel like it would be a "poison pill" type deal where it seriously complicates a thieve's job.

1) Fewer thefts will be profitable 2) Transactions will take longer and involve greater contact between buyers/sellers 3) The market shifts from selling whole phones to components 4) Overall risk/reward ratio goes way down.

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Won't it pretty much be the board that's unusable? Can still make money off the camera, the home button, the battery, the chassis, the screen etc.

SeaFox said:

Yeah, if iOS didn't already have the remote wipe/find my iPhone feature, people could have voted with their wallets by going with another iOS phone maker. Just like folks not happy with Apple's Macintosh hardware lineup are free to buy from another OSX computer maker.

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If iOS didn't have remote wipe/find my iPhone, then how would switching to another iOS phone maker solve anything? (Assuming other iOS phone manufacturers existed of course).

wikiverse said:

There is no difference between a 'nanny state' and a 'corporate nanny'. If anything, most of the time the nanny state is trying to protect you, your interests, and your freedom from the corporate nanny who has significantly more influence over your information, decision making and purchases.

Corporations do not care about you. They only care about your money.

This is the government legislating to give users control over their devices, to protect the user's data and deter theft.

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Protect you from what? A corporation can't force you to do anything. If you don't want to give Apple any money or interact with them in any way, what is there that you need to be "protected" from? You can just go and get cell a cellphone from Samsung, Nokia, LG, HTC or many others. Can't quite say the same thing if you don't give the government money or do what they tell you...

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mw360 said:

Not really. Some things need global solutions. That's why we have governments in the first place. People walking around with expensive phones that can't be locked puts me at risk of robbery whether my phone is secure or not. A thief is not going to test a phone's security before stealing it, he's just going to go with the probabilities.

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Well, lets say only 80% of cellphone manufacturers choose to implement anti-theft systems. That's still going to make stealing a phone a lot less inviting to a thief, because he knows that there's a pretty small chance of getting one that doesn't have anti-thief security.

It's then likely that the other 20% of cellphone manufacturers that have no anti-thief security would would face pressure from the public to implement such a system as well. If they don't, then all they're going to get is bad PR.

Insurance companies do deserve more love than that. <3

cuda12 said:

A law so stupid not even the California legislature would pass it.

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Like every other special interest, if it doesn't pass and people hate it, they just "take it up again next week" and do this over and over and over and over month after month, year after year if necessary until it passes anyway out of sheer sick of seeing it over and over or the "no" voters fail to turn out because of apathy of having to show up every six months to vote no (in the case of constant unending pushes to pass levies few want, but only the "yes" people are motivated to show up at the polls constantly). They do this with with every type of tax levy, every law suddenly created to deal with some accident (e.g. Rover gets run over by a truck, perhaps on purpose, and suddenly there's "Rover's Law" to make running a dog over a felony since people don't take running over dogs seriously enough as this accident shows). It's how we get every over-zealous ridiculous law passed in this country and why our inmate population exceeds every country on earth per capita. They should start removing stupid and ancient pointless laws, not passing more. How on earth did society every survive all these years without these laws?

The more conspiracy theorist in me suspects they want "kill switches" on phones so the government (NSA/CIA) can push a button and render your phone useless. I'm surprised they're not pushing some criminal/terrorist angle on this to stop potential terrorists from using their phones as weapons or to call other terrorists or some other nonsense to reach the day when they just order a drone strike on anyone they don't like and turn off all your methods for calling for help and BANG, you're dead and you're painted as a terrorist with ties to Islamist group or something on the news when in reality all you did was run a commercial against big oil or their new pipeline or something because you don't want that crap in your back yard.

I don't understand all of this resistance. Phone theft is real and the more tools against it the better. Global IMEI blacklist + phone locking are welcomed tools that should be implemented.

Sure there are hackers that workaround the IMEI blocking, and maybe stuff like iCloud locking can be bypassed somehow, but overall it would cut theft by a good margin.

I've seen those iCloud locked iPhones on ebay, afaik they can't be fixed, most people have no idea what to do with them. Phone locking works.

I really don't get why there is so much resistance. And all this nonsense talk about the government interfering, how is this any different from the government imposing regulations on all sorts of safety items?

You don't think phone theft is a safety issue? People get attacked/killed for it: http://www.myfoxla.com/story/205985...-to-death-after-refusing-to-give-up-cellphone

Having a kill switch that YOU control is a tool that empowers you. And it will make your phone lose value in the eyes of a thief, which means less thefts.

cuda12 said:

A law so stupid not even the California legislature would pass it.

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Agreed. People who steal phones aren't stealing them so they can be part of the hyped up hip crowd. They are doing it for the parts.

cuda12 said:

A law so stupid not even the California legislature would pass it.

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Then it must be really stupid for this is little they would not like to regulate. I don't know, why not the market decide what features are or are not important in a cell phone? Competition in this industry has seemed to work pretty well so far without the government getting involved and mucking it up as they always do.

Ichabod. said:

What's the point of the bill if everyone is going to copy Apple anyway?

Edit: ~50% of cellphone thefts in CA and NY are of iPhones, and the other 50% are just people mistaking a Galaxy for an iPhone. The problem is going to fix itself.

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Apparently 90% of statistics are made up. Imagine that

mrsir2009 said:

Well, lets say only 80% of cellphone manufacturers choose to implement anti-theft systems. That's still going to make stealing a phone a lot less inviting to a thief, because he knows that there's a pretty small chance of getting one that doesn't have anti-thief security.

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Absolutely. "A pretty small chance". The thief plays the probabilities.

mrsir2009 said:

It's then likely that the other 20% of cellphone manufacturers that have no anti-thief security would would face pressure from the public to implement such a system as well. If they don't, then all they're going to get is bad PR.

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Disagree. The other 20% get a free ride. Thefts overall fall. Even the owners of the 20% benefit, because the thief, as you said above, doesn't know that the insecure phone is insecure, he only knows that there's a pretty small chance its insecure. Those owners feel safer because crime is falling, and cellphone muggings aren't in the news anymore. There's little pressure then, to chose from the 80% and effectively pay for a feature he/she doesn't feel the need for.

In this case the free market doesn't encourage a proper solution. It encourages each manufacturer to wait for everyone else to implement a solution.