Smartphone theft is on the rise and lawmakers are doing whatever they can to help discourage thieves from stealing more smartphones. This has resulted in certain lawmakers pushing for carrier and smartphone manufacturers to equip their phones with kill switches, thus ultimately rendering the phone useless if a theft were to occur, which in turn would hopefully discourage thieves.
While we’ve yet to see the widespread adoption of the kill switch (it has been proposed in the state of California), Apple has recently decided to throw its name behind a new initiative along with a handful of other Android OEMs that basically see smartphones manufactured after 2015 include a series of anti-theft features.
This features include a remote-wipe function, a remote-lock function, a restore-blocking function that will prevent attempts at wiping the phone, and the ability to restore the original owner’s data upon recovery of the device. These features are all present in Apple’s products at the moment, such as Find my iPhone, Activation Lock, iCloud, and so on, so we guess Apple does not have a lot to do.
It should be noted that this particular program that Apple has joined is completely voluntary, meaning that companies are not legally obligated to participate. So far apart from Apple, companies such as AT&T, Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon have participated in it.
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