When Hitting ‘Find My iPhone’ Takes You to a Thief’s Doorstep

And then you reported him to the local taxi commission, right?

The college where I work has a bit of a reputation now for sending police to the thieves door with a nice printout of where the phone / iPad is. It also helps we have a good set of security cams. I have noticed we seem to have had a long period now where the little thieves know not to take any Apple product.

I figure its a big city vs little town thing.

The kill switch, as designed by the civic agencies asking for it, would be undoable by the owner:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0951-1000/sb...

A key quote: "The rightful owner [...] may affirmatively elect to disable the technological solution"

It's nothing like "giving the government full, unfettered access to our phones."

IMHO I don't think the 'kill switch' agenda has that much to do with government access but more to do with increased sales of handsets.

Right now you can use various software to track down stolen devices, this leads to the owners to pursue the item and try to get back their property. While this method can be dangerous there 'could' be some type of support from law enforcement to help you acquire your stolen items. Instead they just "kill switch it" and now your item is useless to everyone, your only recourse now is to buy the item again.

This kill switch is really only good news for the companies that make these products.

One possible idea that might help is pooling fees similar to an insurance (lets say $20/item in advance or $50+ when stolen) and find private investigators that are willing to get it back for you. The PI will have the resources necessary to get the item back safely and you don't have to pay for a $400+ device.

What do you guys / gals think?

I haven't thought about it much, but I don't see why you need to give the government full unfettered access (or any access) to implement a kill switch.

Do you realise how much Apple / Google can already screw up your phone today, even without a kill switch? Your phone is already constantly contacting their servers and running code from them. If they wanted your phone to stop working, they could do so today.

I had my laptop stolen a few years ago. The police took the serial number and details, and added it to a list they circulated to second-hand/pawn shops; this is checked when big-ticket items are brought in. It was (apparently) also used for searching websites like Craigslist to look for distinguishing features in similar devices sold locally. Pretty cool overall.

So it works in this sense, and while I really like the idea you're talking about, I don't think it'll work for a few of reasons:

1. This is apparently already happening (albeit behind the scenes, and probably only in some areas) 2. It seems unlikely that the seller of a stolen device will be willing to allow you to check the serial number against a database.

OTOH if you do decide it's worth pursuing and you want some technical resource, hit me up :)

>> "If we can tell ​a buyer​ somehow​ that the laptop he is about to buy is stolen, ​there is a high probability that he will not buy it."

I don't think this is true. People buying cheap laptops on the grey/black market care about 1 thing - price. Most know int he back of their minds there is something shady about the deal but it doesn't bother them enough to say no to a low price.

I have lost or had a few things stolen. I'd rather would think of them as broken and let them go probably be more careful next time but without driving myself caremad. If your latop dropped in the water I bet you would be less disappointed than if someone nicked it. If you you can recover it, say for example laptop location showing to be located in a better area of town than it is worth locating and talking to the person, saying you would sumbit their identity to the police. Other than that it is better to let go of upset or it will ruin more of your life than the laptop is worth.

Database of stolen devices is a nice project and maybe can lead to recoverd things, particularly expensive ones, like my $5k camera. But in the end it will prolong grief people who lost their things to various situations. If you device is used for work it is best to insure it and back up regularly. Most pros that use their hardware for work insure their bits of stuff. However hardware is notoriously cheap nowadays even very good laptop costs around 2K, where I have spend 5k in year 2004 for similar setup relevant to the time I was buying it....

The biggest problem with find my Mac is that it has to be connected to the internet to work. I'm guessing people selling on the black market are smart enough to make sure that doesn't happen.

I think a better solution is something like Tile is doing. http://www.thetileapp.com. Install a low powered Bluetooth beacon on every device and use the power crowd source in order to find that device. The two biggest things that would have to happen for it to work would be 1. A major manufacturer like apple would have to install it on every device in order build up a big enough user base to make it feasible 2. The ability to find the lost device would have to require no user input. Basically the person that lost the device would mark it as lost and then every iPhone would now know that and in the background would look for that Bluetooth device and if found would automatically send that location back to the user who lost their device.

It has some privacy concerns but I think this would be an effective way to find lost devices.

Most police forces have some system like that, although it's primarily domestic. There are some cross-country collaboration going on though.

I used to work for a company that recycled used cell phones and as you might imagine, it's very tempting for crooks to try and float their stolen goods there. Because of this, all serial numbers (imei) were checked against a trans national registry (checkmend in the UK). But even though this is commonly known in the UK, and we even advertised it on site, then we would still regularly get stolen phones in.

I think the bigger problem is that most stolen goods are sold directly to the new "owners". In most cases they probably know (or at least suspect) that they are buying stolen goods. They just don't care. Unless you make it a risk for them to buy it (E.g. they knew the police would eventually trace the item and they would face charges of theft), it is not going to stop. People have shitty morals.

We already have this in the UK and its run by the British Police forces.

https://www.immobilise.com/index.php

Great idea, but I think it has a hard chicken and egg problem. You can have lots of people who put their lost serial number on the website, however until until not more than 100k people have heard about your website and are engaged with it, very few people who lost their device will have a match.

I think also there is quite some lots and found websites out there, so maybe it's a better idea to talk to them about implementing your mechanism.

While this is a really clever idea, and I'm really sorry to hear about your computer, I can't help but wonder if you would have a greater impact by, say, designing an online social media campaign to convince thousands of people to spend $30 on MacBook lock cables, over saving a few computers after the fact.

If you set up a one-page infographic and linked to lock cables via Amazon referral links, you might even have the potential to make a few bucks to cover hosting, beer, or donating lock cables to a local underprivileged hackers' group.

Another thing that interests me to solve this is via hardware. There are devices like Tile, Trackr available in the market but they are easily recognizable and thieves will detach them. Alternatives to that could be:

- A paper thin version of above mentioned devices that can be pasted on laptop OR - Replacing a keyboard key with any of the above devices

The hardware will do two things: 1) It will tell the location of the device and 2) It will 'factory reset' the device so that the data doesn't fall into wrong hands.

What do you think?

Something like http://www.tracechecker.com/ , maybe?

> Checking by citizens and Police on Trace is FREE.

One-of-a-kind laptop fully customized with laser engraving (from epiloglaser), and we can add an online database on top of it. Easy to identify at a distance.

Was your laptop in Find My Mac?

www.checkmend.com holds a large database of used electronics..

I'm not sure I agree with that point of view. Phones currently can be located, and yet there are no repossession services around already. And police is already unresponsive when it comes to this* (I don't know if they uncover theft rings, though).

I think phones fall under the same category as bikes - good resale price, low risk[1]. A kill switch doesn't have to be perfect, I think. It only needs to be hard enough to circumvent to make the effort worthless, the same way that the woman in the article found her phone despite it being relatively easy to circumvent the "find my phone" feature.

* Results may vary according to your city and country. [1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...

I believe that kill switches. In my area at around year 2000, when 'dumbphones' were common but still rather pricey, theft or mugging of phones was a common crime. It dropped significantly overnight when IMEI blacklists were implemented and reported stolen phones wouldn't work on local networks. There were still some thefts of luxury phones, where it made sense to export them abroad, but it was a huge reduction.

Even if kill switches can be circumvented and phones can be sold for parts - it significantly reduces the incentive for someone to steal phones, as selling them is more effort and less money; such changes do affect behavior of criminals.

I don't think any current locks prevent clearing the device for resale, which is the main thing needed by thieves. An iPhone, for example, you just hold down power and home and connect to iTunes in recovery mode.

Apple may in the future decide to do this, but I don't think any other OEMs could. They all have romance the carriers to get into stores and the carriers want good serviceability since the way you make money at places like AT&T is by cutting costs down to the bone. More unrepairable, unrefurbishable devices that need to be replaced with new units causes the opposite.

The difference could be that the US market for smart phones is warped through carrier subsidies. A $600 iPhone only costs a consumer $199 up front (they pay the difference through larger monthly fees).

So, at purchase time, an iPhone isn't an expensive phone. But, if you have to replace it off contract, it's very expensive. When it gets stolen, that $200 phone suddenly becomes a $600 phone, which probably leads people to more drastic action, like following criminals to their homes.

It's not really about the value as much as it's about the principle of the matter. Maybe it's an American thing but we have a sense of justice that makes us do irrational things when rationally it shouldn't. For example, someone broke into my car and ended up taking a tennis racket from my trunk. It wasn't expensive to replace but I got in my car and drove around to see if I could spot someone walking around with it. I would have confronted them and fought them if they didn't hand it back. Even then, I would probably call the cops and report the person.

Not sure why you got down voted for that. I did this not when stuff was stolen but when expensive stuff packed in. I now tend to use budget devices (Moto G and old thinkpad).

If you can't afford to replace it, you probably shouldn't have bought it.