Whereas if phones can be located, it seems like a great opportunity for repossession companies to offer a phone retrieval service, and for police to aggregate data on recovered phone to identify theft rings.
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...
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.
We are still using short passwords instead of strong private keys; we give unencrypted access of our data to cloud providers to make things easier for us. How can ultimate authority/access of our property be made user friendly enough for joe user/sixpack?
Stolen phones ended up in Russia and India, after having their IMEIs reprogrammed by professional fences. Many carriers opposed mandatory IMEI blacklisting laws/regulations on the grounds it is ineffective.
This gives an expectation that killswitches also can achieve their crime reduction goals even if professional fences are able to circumvent the killswitches.