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Comment by Piskvorrr | Hacker News Reader

"And btw, we have a remote kill switch that we can use against any of your devices made by us, at our whim. Be grateful that we're using it for Good...for now."

There's nothing in that scenario that could possibly go wrong, is there? #gwx #greatpr

(Also, "kill switch" for devices that may or may not spontaneously self-combust is just about the worst possible choice of word)

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I would be super happy if I lost all of my data without my consent. If they backed it up on their servers beforehand, I would be angry they violated my privacy without my acknowledgement. If they disable my phone during an emergency, I'd be outright pissed off.

This is a lose-lose situation all around.

Shouldn't whatever plans you have to mitigate data loss in case your phone gets destroyed in an accident be adaptable to deal with this situation?

Because every consumer of commodity smartphones does that, don't they?

Even though it is not explicitly suggested by the article I would imagine that the phone maintains its emergency contact features as well as any data in storage to transfer later. The idea is to discourage someone from using their phone as actively as possible until they send it in for the swap.

In many other circumstances it would certainly be an unwelcome precedent, but, this probably isn't as nefarious a hidden kill-switch as you seem to be implying.

The vendors already have and regularly use the capability to push remote software updates, including to low level components like the bootloader or radio baseband. An update to the bootloader which turns it into a display stating "this device is an explosion risk, return it for replacement immediately" and shuts the phone down wouldn't be far-fetched.

I understand the urgency, and I'm not saying they would use it for Evil ;)

Just that saying "we have means to brick devices, and we will use them in anger" is not going to improve their reputation.

Technically, any phone OEM that pushes automated updates has a remote kill switch. On Android, you could even bypass the OS update by updating one of your core apps remotely and having that handle it. So, yes, every phone OEM has a remote kill switch.

I wonder if/how this is covered contractually. Seems like the kind of thing that should be required to be explicitly called out.

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