This week, the major telecommunications carriers in the United States finally agreed to make a mandatory “kill switch” option available on all cell phones by 2015. It’s a move that has been praised as a long time coming and slammed as incremental. However, it has also been resisted in certain corners by those who feel that the option will be abused. No one disputes that mobile phone theft is on the rise. The San Francisco police department has reported that a whopping 67% of all theft cases are related to mobile devices; 10% of phone owners have reportedly had a device stolen at some point. Consumer Reports claims that 1.2 million phones were stolen in 2012, with 3.1 million reported thefts in 2013. The question is whether a manufacturer-enabled “kill switch,” a method of disabling a device remotely, would be an effective means of short-circuiting a thriving market in stolen devices. US carriers have previously balked at manufacturer-implemented kill switches. Sam...
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