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Yeah the phone companies should be responsible for fixing this. That way we don't have to prosecute the criminals as usual. :rolleyes:

You're quite naive if you think it's possible to prosecute everything. It's incredibly inefficient to hand everything through force. If the phones become useless when stolen, criminals will not want them. They make a popular target due to small size and ample secondhand market.
 
"113 smartphones are stolen or lost in the U.S. every minute and users are most likely to lose their device at a fast food restaurant or grocery store. In fact, phone thefts are said to account for 40% of all New York City robberies and nearly 70% of all cell phones stolen on subways and buses are iPhones."

Source: Protect Your Bubble.
 
Wow, really? "gubmint"? Free iPhone?

Some people just think everything is a conspiracy.

Let's see, we can pay millions in tax dollars chasing down criminals or we can put in preventative measures that make the items less appealing to thieves.....:rolleyes:

And then, even after you write this good rebuttal, there is another poster with similar knuckleheaded thinking and rhetoric, immediately following yours, in post #16.

The old saying "Never attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence", begs a corrollary: Never give weight to a conspiracy theory advocated by anti-social know-it-all types.
 
Tif a phone was stolen on iOS7 and had been restored to iOS6 it will still NOT activate!

Given it is going to be impossible to restore a phone on iOS 7 back to iOS 6, this really doesn't matter. The only reason you can restore back to iOS 6 right now is because iOS 7 is a beta.
 
Media+wh0re DA using Apple for attention. Could not be more obvious. I feel bad for SF taxpayers who had to pay for this charade.
 
Really! Read this Article!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...eople-day-targeted-bike-riding-criminals.html

300 Phones a day snatched from people while using the phone!
Thats only in the UK alone!

Please get your facts straight before shouting off about how useless this is!

If it stops a few people from getting stabbed, shot or killed, then this is certainly a worth while addition!

FIRST...it's not 300 PHONES a day...it's 300 ELECTRONIC DEVICES a day...talk about getting your facts straight!

300 people a day in all of the UK? That's not a huge statistic but nobody likes it. And this would sound very much like organized crime...let the police catch of a few of these organized crime folks and throw the book at them.

As someone else pointed out, punish the thieves. It's not even a major crime...the posts on this thread make it sound like it's murder or rape or aggravated assault. Someone stole your phone at the bar last night...boo hoo. Or, did you just leave it at the bar or it fell out of your pocket in the bathroom or dance floor?

Next, people are going to ask that laws are changed to make stealing smartphones a felony or in par with stealing a car or home invasion.
 
I don't see how phone theft/loss is any kind of issue that warrants District Attorneys, governments, and phone manufacturers to somehow deter it.

1)Don't lose your phone
2)Smartphones are all software...regardless of how one "secures it", a true thief will know this and either he/she or the "black market" will easily unlock it. Period.
3)Laptops have been lost/stolen for decades and you don't see Apple/Wintel working to prevent that. What about iPods, cd-walkmans, watches, handbags, etc? Again, don't lose your stuff and/or leave it around where it has a fair chance of being stolen.
4)If your phone gets lost or stolen, big deal...you call your Carrier, they assure you won't be billed to data/calls it makes, you plunk down $$$ for another phone, and you move on. Sure, you may have lost your pictures or possibly opened up your email to a thief...but a)go change your password(s) on your email system super ASAP and b)life's tough...so you lost some pictures.
5)How about this scenario: You buy a used phone on eBay or from a friend and days later the seller reports the phone stolen just to be a jerk.
6)I understand that smartphones are relatively small so they fit in pockets...and could be misplaced or pick-pocketed or even just fall out due to their size...but so are wallets, jewelry, and cash. Again, don't lose the phone just like you try hard not to lose your wallet, jewelry, and cash.


This topic has been talked about for over a year and it always is made to sound like a band of criminals is following you down the street waiting to knock you unconscious and steal your phone. Not in the USA...and not in most civilized countries.

So, basically, your plan is "don't be stupid and plan to lose your phone" and, if you are stupid and lose it, just shell out another $200-$600 for a new phone. No big deal. What? You DON'T have an extra $200-$600 lying around?
 
5)How about this scenario: You buy a used phone on eBay or from a friend and days later the seller reports the phone stolen just to be a jerk.
eBay scenario: eBay will reimburse you 100%
Friend scenario: You need better friends
 
I'm very much looking forward to this feature. If properly implemented, the 2nd-ary market for stolen devices should dry-up.

Now that Apple is better protecting us on the device end, and will soon be better protecting us on the password synced keychain middle, all we have to worry about is that they are consistently striving to be best of the best in protecting their user encryption in transit and customer information data storage operations.

Would be interesting for apple to give a State of Apple Security update every once and a while. Clear statements here would have a very powerful marketing benefit.
 
....also noting that Microsoft and Google had not yet come forth with their plans to combat theft...

Not true. Their strategy is to design products no one wants. I was in the subway the other day, someone put a gun to my head and told me, "Take this Windows phone and you won't be hurt."
 
So, basically, your plan is "don't be stupid and plan to lose your phone" and, if you are stupid and lose it, just shell out another $200-$600 for a new phone. No big deal. What? You DON'T have an extra $200-$600 lying around?

Partially...yes...that is what I am saying. And what about all those free iPhones or the $99 iPhones? You claim they are all $200+.

Partially, of course it's nice to have security measures in place...and Apple already does...but to have government step in and make mandates?...so unnecessary.
 
eBay scenario: eBay will reimburse you 100%
Friend scenario: You need better friends

Don't forget craigslist scenario, where you take the time to actually swap the ownership (however that is done, online or via 800#). Anyone on Sprint or Verizon knows what I'm talking about
 
This is the same as car manufacturers went through years ago when cars could be stolen in about 10 seconds flat using a bit of bent wire. Pressure was applied to the car industry to sort out the problem and we started to see decent locks and security built into ignition systems. It didn't stop car theft completely but it reduced it a lot. Now we are seeing the same with mobile phones. The activation lock will not stop all mobile phone theft but it will probably reduce it a lot.
 
FIRST...it's not 300 PHONES a day...it's 300 ELECTRONIC DEVICES a day...talk about getting your facts straight!

300 people a day in all of the UK? That's not a huge statistic but nobody likes it. And this would sound very much like organized crime...let the police catch of a few of these organized crime folks and throw the book at them.

As someone else pointed out, punish the thieves. It's not even a major crime...the posts on this thread make it sound like it's murder or rape or aggravated assault. Someone stole your phone at the bar last night...boo hoo. Or, did you just leave it at the bar or it fell out of your pocket in the bathroom or dance floor?

Next, people are going to ask that laws are changed to make stealing smartphones a felony or in par with stealing a car or home invasion.

The fact is, when someone on the street points a gun at your face today, they don't want your wallet, they want your phone. It's not people finding the phone and reselling it, it is muggers going after the phone, quite often shooting people for them. You are safer waving a fist full of $100 bills in the air on the subway than you are, pulling out an iPad.
 
5)How about this scenario: You buy a used phone on eBay or from a friend and days later the seller reports the phone stolen just to be a jerk.

I can imagine if that happened you would get refunded from ebay and the 'friend' would be arrested wasting police time and possibly other crimes.
 
Hopefully this works as advertised. At the end of the day, any deterrent is a good thing and certainly a positive step in reducing smartphone theft. It's certainly better than throwing your hands in the air and doing nothing at all.

It's like locking your doors at night, planting sharp, prickly bushes in front of your windows, installing a security system, having a dog. While not 100 percent effective in all cases, these are all things that deter burglars. If the neighbour's house is an easier target they'll just go rob them.
 
The fact is, when someone on the street points a gun at your face today, they don't want your wallet, they want your phone...

And that is fine...so have the cops find these terrible muggers. Again, there are security features in the phones (and they will ALWAYS be hacked) and there's ALWAYS room for improvement in security...but having the government get involved in securing the latest toy that gets stolen is a waste of time and resources. Spend the resources on the cops to get the criminals off the streets.
 
phone theft is run by organized crime. cheaper and faster to get apple and samsung to design phones that make it harder to be used while stolen than to spend years investigating these rings

just like car thefts in the 80's. the auto makers made it harder to steal cars, and thefts dropped

some wintel laptops have a hardware based anti-theft system

This is nowhere near correct. Businesses turn a blind eye to theft and just accept smartphones for cash. Like bicycles, the risk/reward ratio makes it very attractive for people to steal smartphones and then go sell them to cash. People literally show up with bags of smartphones to places that buy smartphones, and the businesses turn a blind eye to where people might be getting those bags of phones. The businesses then resell the phones for a huge profit. Because it is so easy to turn a smartphone into cash, it leads to an increase of that item being stolen.
 
And that is fine...so have the cops find these terrible muggers. Again, there are security features in the phones (and they will ALWAYS be hacked) and there's ALWAYS room for improvement in security...but having the government get involved in securing the latest toy that gets stolen is a waste of time and resources. Spend the resources on the cops to get the criminals off the streets.
So you have no problem with spending the time and resources to assign 100 cops in a major metro area to a task force dedicated to tracking down muggers that steal smartphones, but you consider it a waste of time and resources to have an Attorney General make some noise for manufacturers to implement a system that will lessen the need to spend time and resources for 100 cops to be running around focused on this one issue?

Cops are part of government. The amount of time and resources cities are having to spend paying cops to deal with the smartphone theft issues is increasing every year. :confused:
 
And that is fine...so have the cops find these terrible muggers. Again, there are security features in the phones (and they will ALWAYS be hacked) and there's ALWAYS room for improvement in security...but having the government get involved in securing the latest toy that gets stolen is a waste of time and resources. Spend the resources on the cops to get the criminals off the streets.

Cops don't work. The best the police can ever do is take a report, after the robbery or inform the family after the victim has been shot. Local government can't fix this problem. State government is worthless. The only way to fix this problem is for the Federal government to set standards and private companies to meet those standards.
 
What's wrong with you? You cannot prosecute thousands of stolen phones.
Go outside and learn something about the real life..

Seriously? I grew up in Philadelphia, I think I know about "real life".
I had many things stolen from me as a child one being my Jacket taken from me at gun point.

All they are doing is telling the thieves to go steal something else. Like wallets,tools, gold chains etc.. , it's a shell game and that's all it is.

Good luck prosecuting a criminal with those items in their possession. Cash and gold have no identifiable information = no prosecution.
 
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