Just wondering if there is a need for the Apple Watches to have a remote kill or wipe function as the phones do. Not sure if anything is actually stored on the Watch or 100% linked with the phones.
I know there is Apple Pay association, but not sure if the system wouldn't still be secure since I assume your phone has to be within range of the watch to activate Apple Pay.
Discussion on scenarios or more info is appreciated.
First, your phone does not need to be in range at all to use Apple Pay. It will require you to enter a PIN each time you put the watch on if the phone is not nearby. If the watch is removed, it will lock again automatically. Apple Pay on the watch will require your watch is able to detect it's on your skin, btw, which means not wearing it over sleeves or some such fashion faux pas.
Second, almost nothing is stored on the watch currently that would necessitate remote wipe. When you associate a card with apple pay on the watch it actually makes a new device specific ID separate from the one you may already have on your phone. Second, this ID can be invalidated without any contact with the watch/phone as it is invalidated by the card issuer.
Third party apps can't store anything that isn't included in their bundle from the app store except generated images, which are probably only kept in RAM, but, this I can't confirm. It's the most likely source of data loss concerns.
Some things like your activity tracking results from a run before getting back to the phone may be stored, but, so what?
You might have up to 2gb of music. I guess you could've stupidly encoded secrets into audio files and synchronized them to the watch.
You have a small space for synchronizing photos. Don't synch anything sensitive like your collection of GILF porn. Nobody needs to see that on their arm.
All that said, it's actually possible for the watch to have a remote wipe capability in the sense that, if someone was to try to pair it, the watch app could check for reported lost/stolen items and respond by notifying you of its best guessed location and deleting all its data right then and there.
I'll go ahead and suspect some better thought out security measures exist, but, we'll have to wait a bit to be sure. Still, there isn't a large threat here, not even with the apple pay feature.
