Killing Mobile: The Advent of the "Kill Switch"
Last week, many of the major phone manufacturers and wireless companies announced they would offer an antitheft feature on smartphones. The feature, known as a kill switch, will include several components aimed at deterring theft.
Some components of the kill switch may differ from phone to phone or carrier to carrier, but all smartphone manufacturers who have joined the movement will offer the ability for users to remotely erase all data from their devices in the event their phones are lost or stolen. When the data is erased from the phone, the phone becomes inoperable except for emergency functions like dialing 911.
Don’t panic yet. Just because your phone is lost doesn’t mean you lose all your information, contacts, and important data. Death by the kill switch isn’t a death to last all eternity. Information on the phone prior to kill switch activation can be restored so long as restoring the data is feasible from the cloud.
Are you harboring negative feelings about your phone having a kill switch? Well, you might have to kill off those feelings because you may not have a choice. The Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment poses that all smartphones manufactured after July 2015 will adhere to the kill switch agenda put forth by CTIA—The Wireless Association.
CNN reports that as of April 16, 2014, AT&T, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon have all joined the movement. You may notice that one smartphone juggernaut is missing from that list.
That is because Apple has already begun to implement a similar initiative. As part of iOS7, users can enforce the Activation Lock feature that prevents their phones from being reactivated even if they are reset.
While falling short of the scope proposed by CTIA, this feature from Apple shows that the company is already taking steps to deter mobile theft. This is significant because even though other companies are set to join the movement on paper, there is still serious push from critics—both for and against the initiative—that could squash the whole idea.
Currently, there are two main arguments against the kill switch commitment. The argument that may pose the biggest threat to the kill switch is that the initiative would significantly maim the cell phone industry, which saw $30 billion in revenue from replacing stolen or lost phones. The other argument is that hackers could exploit the kill switch technology and turn it against the very users it is designed to protect.
