Smartphone Makers Commit To Supporting Anti-Theft Tools

[jos]

 

A group of smartphone manufacturers and U.S. carriers agreed to sign the "Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment", which said that all smartphones manufactured after July 1, 2015 will need to have a baseline anti-theft tool that's either preloaded or downloadable to the phones. It will also need to be available at no cost to consumers.

The anti-theft tool will also include multiple capabilities to deter thieves from taking advantage of the stolen phone, including:

• Remote wiping: The tool should be able to remotely delete all personal and sensitive information from the phone.

• Phone locking: This is a feature all phones should have by now, but it falls onto the user to enable a PIN or fingerprint lock.

• Preventing reactivation without the owner's permission.

• Reversing the inoperability if the phone is recovered by the authorized user. Data should also be restored from the cloud, but this will likely depend on whether the user has enabled cloud syncing or not.

The companies that signed the agreement cover most, if not all, of the nation's mobile customers and include: 

• Apple Inc. 
• Assurant, Inc. 
• Asurion
• AT&T
• BlackBerry Limited
• Google Inc.
• HTC America, Inc.
• Huawei Device USA
• LG Electronics Mobile
• Comm USA, Inc.
• Motorola Mobility LLC
• Microsoft Corporation
• Samsung Telecommunications America, L.P.
• Sprint Corporation
• T-Mobile USA
• U.S. Cellular
• Verizon Wireless
• ZTE USA, Inc.

 

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Hope no one will go around hunting for phone and gets shot..

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/smartphone-anti-theft-tools-commitment,29488.html

[NickTheMajin]

iPhone's have something like this. If an iPhone is running iOS 7 and has been passcode locked there is no way to wipe or reset the phone. Making any stolen iphone basically a brick. 

[linuxfan66]

my biggest issue is and i use an iphone with this feature is people who dont turn off the antitheft feature before selling making a handdown phone an impossible to fix nightmare due to no proof of transfer of ownership...