After months of debate in the CA senate, Governor Brown signed off on the smartphone kill switch law yesterday, following Minnesota as the second state to combat the growing rates of smartphone theft. The general idea being, if the phone is completely disabled or “bricked”, it wont be valuable to thieves, so it’s less likely to be stolen.
With very few exceptions (mainly for older handsets) any company wishing to sell a smartphone in the state must have some option for completely disabling it in the event it’s lost or stolen. There’s a $2500 fine per device for any company which fails to offer this feature. The law will affect any phone sold after July 1, 2015.
While carriers make up the bulk of phone sales, manufacturers will likely be responsible for developing the actual process that locks the phone down. Google for example sells their Nexus phone directly to consumers, so whatever process they develop will likely be embraced by other Android manufacturers.
Apple already has a fairly robust “Lost Mode” built into iOS, requiring someone to enter their Apple ID password before the phone can be used. This pass code continues to lock the phone down even if someone else factory resets the phone.
Microsoft has built in tools to find, lock, and erase, and we’ve reviewed Google’s Device Manager which offers up similar features, but neither of those company’s solutions will survive a hard reset.
California’s kill switch law will not affect tablets, another commonly stolen item, but if manufacturers improve the ability to remotely manage and lock phones down, these features will likely make their way into other data connected mobile products.
