Smartphonetechie
Lately the increase in smartphone theft has raised many concerns all over the world. Smartphones these days costs around $500 and are comparatively smaller in size. Hence they are very attractive and lucrative target for thieves.
As per the recent report published by Los Angeles Police Department there is an increase of 50% in smartphones theft compared to last year. This increase is quite alarming and in order to control this increasing number a new law has been passed in California. According to this new law, “Kill Switches” are now mandatory in smartphones and should be incorporated by smartphone manufacturers.
The idea behind this law is to control the smartphone theft. Kill Switch will allow the user to activate it at the time of setting up their phone for the very first time. So, if in case smartphone is lost or stolen user can lock the phone using this Kill Switch. This will make the smartphone useless for other users.
A number of similar features are already available on both Android and IOS. With Android Device manager you can lock your device and it is now refined with Android 5.0 update. Similarly, Apple iCloud offers a similar feature. However anyone can quite easily bypass Apple Anti-Theft feature. Having said that it is very first time that we have seen a law which has made it mandatory for smartphone manufacturers to offer a built-in Kill Switch feature.
According to this law, every smartphone sold in the state of California after 1st July 2015 should come with this new feature. If in case smartphone does not have the feature then manufacturer will be fined $500 to $2500 per phone.
This is definitely a good step and should be implemented in other states as well. We believe that this will help in controlling the increasing number of smartphone theft cases in the state.
