Thieves sell to unscrupulous merchants who pay hundreds of dollars for phones - no questions asked - and then 'jailbreak' them. They unlock the units, erase their data, reprogram them, and put them up for resale.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad.
It's not fair that people save and work and pay for phones from whatever funds they have, and other people get them for free.
A lot of individuals out there carry a lot of proprietary information on their mobile devices, and they're not protected. It's a very target-rich environment.
The cell phone companies add to the problem. Every one they give out, they get money for from the federal government. So they have an incentive to give as many away as possible. And that's exactly what they're doing, and they're making a killing.
Really, what the government is asking Apple to do is to make every individual who uses an iPhone susceptible to hacking by bad people, foreign governments, and anyone who wants.
Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.
Technologies, including cell phones, have the potential to help millions of poor people out of poverty by enabling access to a range of safe, affordable financial services - most importantly, savings accounts - that have long been out of reach.
The most promising privacy thing is stupid phones. I'm dumping all my smart phones.
Hacking into a victim of crime's phone is a sort of poetically elegant manifestation of a modus operandi the tabloids have.
A factory-installed security measure - one that phone owners would have to opt out of, rather than opting in - could automatically render purloined devices inoperable on any network, anywhere in the world. No resale value, no thefts.