IPad rental service for tourists. Security implications?

bcnrentapad.com

4 points·mobiplayer··3 comments

I'm working to launch an iPad rental service for tourists in Barcelona and I want to discuss here the security implications for me and for my customers.

It'll come with unlimited 3G data plan but the sim card will have voice calls locked (just voip). I'm trying to think of a way to not charge the customers if an iPad is lost/stolen/broken but anything brilliant didn't come yet. Also, I need my customers to be safe knowing that all the data will be wiped when they return the iPad. With iOS 5 I probably could do it without iTunes, but is it really safe?

Do you see any more problems that I haven't think about?

I'm assuming that you'd use "Find My iPhone" (or iPad) to locate and wipe the device in case you discovered that someone rented it and never came back. I'm sort of curious how well that works, because I suspect it wouldn't take long for someone to try outright stealing a rented device. Could you count on police to follow that information to track down the stolen property and the thief?

Yes, I'm testing the "Find my iPhone" feature and it works how you expect. I've read some stories about spanish police using the geolocation data of stolen smartphones to help recover them.

I still didn't come up with an answer to "What happens if someone brings the iPad back to their country?". Although I could locate it I probably couldn't recover it :-\

The only way is having a deposit from the credit card of the customer, but I don't like to retain some hundred bucks of someone who is on their holidays.

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