“On Wednesday, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that they will convene a Smartphone Summit next week wherein they will attempt to convince the largest players in the smartphone industry that they need to do something to head off violent crimes involving mobile devices,” Kevin Bostic reports for AppleInsider. “The meeting will take place on June 13 at Schneiderman’s office in New York City.”
“The two state attorneys will ask Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung to begin designing their phones and operating systems so that they contain a ‘kill switch,’ the ability to remotely render a phone inoperable,” Bostic reports. “Such an addition, the attorneys hold, would make smartphone theft a moot point, since any device would become useless once reported stolen.”
Bostic reports, “Between January 1 and September 23 of last year, thefts of Apple products in New York City were up 40 percent. Apple product theft accounted for 14 percent of major crime in New York City. In San Francisco last year, roughly half of all robberies involved a mobile communication device.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds more like a societal problem than an electronic device problem.
How about, for a change, doing something to really deal with and change the behavior of the type of people that steal things from other people?
Remove iPhone from the thieves’ list and they’ll just go back to snatching purses, grabbing necklaces, etc. They’re criminals. That’s what they do. They steal things from other people. It’s not the fault of the things, it’s the fault of the thieves.
It’s as stupid as trying to deal with obesity by trying to ban something like large sodas. The underlying causes for the fat-entombed remain unresolved. To wash down their Twinkies, they’ll just buy two mediums instead, dummy. Now, you’ve got them drinking even more soda than before. Brilliant idea. Very effective.
You have a condemned dam that’s rapidly deteriorating. Trying to stick bandaids over one leak after another isn’t going to fix it.
We realize that asking a San Francisco District Attorney and a New York Attorney General to focus on the root issues of what creates crime as opposed to the inane and unending task of trying to limit things for criminals to steal could be controversial in certain quarters. With logic on our side, we’re quite comfortable with that.
Yes, it’s a lot more work and takes a lot more time to address the root problems. That’s probably why these politicians instead gravitate to easier-to-apply-but-wholly-ineffective bandaids.
iPhones don’t steal from people. People steal iPhones from people.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related article:
The New York Times tries to blame Apple for smartphone thefts – May 2, 2013