What happens to a smartphone when it gets stolen?
hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
No, if that $3 part takes an ESD discharge, the entire $1000+ assembly is now (as far as the customer is concerned) scrap and needs to be RMA'd and replaced or repaired at our expense and the customer will, quite correctly, think it's unreliable junk from now on.
Whatever you think of those side-activities, I'm sure fewer people would have any problem with them if they were confident that their possessions would be recovered if stolen (and more important crimes prosecuted).
You know what does?
The wholesale destruction of the NHS and ambulance services leading to the police being the first response to mental health issues.
Police are the wrong agency to deal with this, but currently in the UK, the police are pretty much always the first (often only) to deal with MH issues and get people into care/section them etc.
I can't talk about Scotland, Wales, or NI. But here's the data for England:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...
There were 34,000 detentions under the act. Of these, only 4,150 were detentions following a Section 135 / 136 place of safety order (the bit of the Mental Health Act that the police can use).
The CQC also have their "Monitoring use of the Mental Health Act" report here: https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health...
This strengthens the point you're making. EG https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health... and https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health... both talking about the poor care recieved by patients as a result of the defunding of the NHS and social care systems.
Yes, this could end up being a fine of $10,000 for stealing a $150 phone, but there is an argument to be made that it is justified (and just).
What are the arguments against?
>The issue in the UK is that the Police suffers from scope creep. The UK police force has been criticized for expanding its scope to include enforcing anti-hate crime laws and investigating "non-crime hate incidents."...
Obviously these cases are rare [that's why they make headlines], But the fact they happen at all doesn't do the police's reputation any favours, when there are 'actual' crimes being effectively ignored through claimed lack of resources.
You're very, very unlikely to be robbed by someone who's doing it for the first and only time in their life. Most likely, you'll come across a gang of organized criminals, which you can now put in jail, and recover value worth tens of thousands of pounds, return it back to their owners, restore faith in "the system", and possibly uproot a major crime operation.
It's such a massive fucking win I don't understand why they don't enforce it more.
Pull a few officers of Twitter duty, and maybe do some real police work?
https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-broken-win...
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/revis...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/broken-windo...
For reference, it’s the most affluent county in GA (not saying much in the grand scheme of things) and I work remotely at $BigTech. So while I make over twice the median household income for the area, we still get looked at suspiciously.
I had a house built in the most affluent county in the metro area and I make over twice the median income of the area - in GA - thanks to the fact that I work remotely for $BigTech.
My family constantly were looked at suspiciously. The county was an infamous “sun down town” as late as the 80s.
https://kaltura.uga.edu/media/t/1_958u30nt/86446941
It’s not as bad now as people have migrated in from the north and the county as grown. But those folks are still there.
I found the location of my phone with the then new feature. I called the police. They met me at the house where the phone was located. The person who lived at the house said he didn’t take it. The police couldn’t do anything.
The catch is, the guy was telling the truth.
The next morning, I looked up the owner of the house next door where the phone now reported it was. I called the owner who said it was a rental. He asked his tenants did they steal the phone. They denied it too. They were also telling the truth. But they did tell me that their neighbor actually worked at the YMCA where I left it.
I called the manager at the YMCA and he had the person bring the phone back.
So the moral of the story is that I falsely suspected two people of stealing my phone based on its location.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/epz9nm/colorado-grandma-...
But my Amex automatically covers any lost or stolen phone up to $800 as long as I pay the monthly bill with the card.
I'd imagine if the police followed this phone they'd find hundreds of phones and other stolen goods at the location.
That's the exploit the criminals are working from: do the unenforced petty crime repeatedly as an occupation.
It's probably More profitable for reducing crime to hunt those people down because they're doing it operationally whereas some perpetrator of a crime of passion isn't doing it multiple hours every night.
Also, I'm not actually advocating for locking those people up so much as getting them on the right track. That kind of initiative and organization is admirable, just stop robbing people with it
I never got a full story other than it was some larger operation where plenty of other things were recovered.
I think if you walked into a police station and said you had something stolen when very reliable tracking information and was able to convince a detective, they'd likely be very interested. By as cynical as you want but things like that are exactly why they took the job.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the defund movement but catching occupational criminals sounds pretty much exactly what I think the police should be doing
The query may be easy for the most-egregious operators.
It may be in Apple's interest to look for them, too. "Don't steal Apple phones. A trillion dollar company will pay a data scientist to bust you at scale."
This is because the police in the system are, largely, more worried about going after crimes for larger numbers/institutions. IE: A city walmart will stage police, and pay for them.
A police organization will focus on whatever channel the support comes from.
In addition to being largely built on the idea of escalation instead of compassion.
Look at the use of the word “petty” - to the person who’s entire life is on that phone it is not petty at all.
There's enough news stories about American police raiding the wrong address based on FindMy that the UK justice system simply refuses to see it as sufficient evidence.
Which is partly why phone thieves in the UK get to operate with near impunity.
He was a door security in one of the clubs in central London and apparently a police officer lost their phone in that club last night and gps did point at our address so they assumed he stole it. They kept searching the whole house, including my room until they finally found the lost phone in another room. Another flatmate went to that club that night for a party together with security guy. Strangely after they found the phone they kept searching.
In the end they finally told us they were not really looking for a phone but for a police badge that was lost together with the phone. The guy said he found only phone, I think he was laying but that is not part of the story. Point is, they have ability if they have motivation. Took them only few hours since party was over to come knocking, 7 officers, and do the search.
I guess the security guy living in the area where GPS was pointing could be considered extra evidence but surly if with enough phones stolen and clear pattern of them going to the same area they could collect enough evidence.
I think, they don't do it for each phone because they don't have resources and these are low priority not because they can't do it.
You are correct though that stolen phones are deemed low priority, the term used for it is "volume crime".
"Why don't the police use findmy" comes up nearly weekly on the /r/policeuk subreddit. Same answer every time - too inaccurate for a warrant, not enough priority to put the work in to develop further evidence to pursue a warrant.
The biggest reason I've stopped voting for democrats is because of this. If you ever experience being the victim of a crime in a city/state run by democrats it's a slap in the face how little the police care. Hit and run? "Submit a report online." Have a meth-head living in your garage and they're screaming violently for hours? "Call the non-emergency line--it's not illegal to be crazy." This can't be a effective way to run a city, but in California it's the norm.
> The police weren't even interested in the video.
Why would the police want to see a video if no crime has taken place? What did you expect the police to do?
My two buildings have over 128 households. And even if they got a fix on one gate, that's 16 households. And the law says you cannot enter anyones home without a court order here.
So there's really no point in even coming over.
Small town where you know the cops by name? Sure.
Incompetently ran large cities with adversary relationship with corrupt civil service? Maybe not.
They'll lean on the door, bang on the hinges, make you think they're going to break it down.
But as long as they stay outside your door, and it's not reeking of weed or something, just refuse to open.
For now, they're trying to overturn this constitutional protection due to gang violence lately.
Anyway, most people are criminals just waiting to get caught. Most people speed, jay walk, go through red lights at least once in their life, unintentionally lie on tax forms, forget to declare things at customs, etc. You’re probably a criminal, the odds are not in your favor… so, if you are serious, you should take a look in the mirror.
None of those things are nearly as bad as large-scale phone theft. And contrast the words "unintentionally" and "forget" with intentionally stealing property that you know belongs to someone else.
Personally, I’d rather hire an ex-con who said they were desperate than someone who did it “accidentally” (I.e. a kleptomaniac whose only treatment was a prison cell. Yes, that’s an actual mental illness.) but most people speed on purpose, jay walk on purpose, run stop signs… on purpose. These crimes actually put people’s lives at risk and steals literal time from people’s lives! That’s surely worse than stealing lumps of metal, glass and plastic that can be easily repurchased at nearby stores throughout the world?
Anyway, there is only one crime that usually cares whether you do it on purpose or not. That’s murder. Virtually ever other crime doesn’t care whether it is on purpose or by accident. It’s not like when you pull someone’s criminal background, it says: jaywalked by accident. You either do the crime, or not. Most people on this planet perform crimes habitually and on purpose (sometimes without even the knowledge that they did a crime!). It doesn’t matter. Most people are criminals…
One thing I find really interesting about the country I’m currently living in is that nothing you get arrested for will show up on a background check unless it is specifically related to the job you’re applying for. Thus theft will show up for retail, but not for writing software or secretarial jobs. I wish the US did something like that so people could have a fresh start in a new career.
You'd rather have someone steal your phone than jaywalk in front of you and force you to slow down?
But putting the life of myself, my passengers, and the idiot walking in front of my moving vehicle at risk?? Do people actually value a replaceable object more than lives that can never be replaced?? Is that a thing?
Free to you, maybe. But someone has to pay for it.
> Do people actually value a replaceable object more than lives that can never be replaced??
No. This is why we all agree that murder and manslaughter are worse crimes than phone theft. But jaywalking is not murder or manslaughter.
To be clear, does "it" mean "jaywalking" there?
Police is not interested in petty crime. (A thief in this story was likely connected to a vast "organized crime" network, but try to prove this to the police when you are filling the report and they see just another stolen iPhone).
But its real value was reassuring middle class voters that “something was being done: — after all they could see it!
It also meant a crackdown on the lowest level drug dealers and harassing young black men just minding their own business. This was largely invisible to most of the aforesaid middle class voters, but allowed cops to report great crime statistics without havinto take any risk by going after the real criminals.
* not to be confused with the “broken windows fallacy” in economics.
Like any metric driven process you need to be careful with the metrics. After awhile the compstat system became part of the internal political machinery of NYPD. It was a means to reward friends and punish rivals. People got stuck in the middle.
So the equivalent of mid-level directors at NYPD did what people do - cooked the books. If they were expected to yield a 20% increase in citations, they’d find some bullshit way to get them. If they needed to reduce rapes, they would charge assaults.
This happened because of poor governance and that the people who pioneered statistics driven policing were from the transit police and were able to overstep the normal bureaucracy.
The incompetence of leadership and fostering of a toxic culture is continuing with the knee jerk responses. We’re ignoring crime and fostering a broken culture in the police forces nationally.
The patrolman is there to take a report.
In a case affecting me, a guy was stealing low value items from my porch every week. Solution: i got the surveillance video on TV and it caught the eye of a detective lieutenant who knew the guy.
The easiest path to this sort of thing is to know cops and phone a friend. Otherwise, 500 people were grifted that day… nobody cares.
I'm not sure how precise they really are, for the purpose of recovery anyway.
One day, the police knocked on my door while I was staying at a hotel. They were looking for a just-lost iPad, and the "Find-My" feature put it right by my room.
Problem is, the room was in a multi-story structure, and the pin, when I looked at it, was in the middle of the hotel (any so was my room).
I have a lot of critiques of the police, but I really don't think we have put them in a good position to retrieve stolen property AND I think trying to retrieve stolen property is generally a really inefficient way to make victims of crime whole.
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if the thief here really was just a chav on a bike that flogged the phone off cheap to some guy he initially met on Facebook Marketplace. That guy probably paid a couple of quid to some random in India to attempt to unlock the phone remotely (without telling the buyer how he does it), and when that failed it would have been shipped to a contact in China who the buyer knew paid $x for a iPhone with an uncracked screen.
Also interesting to see the difference in culture. In Australia, if you lose your phone (almost always from falling out of your pocket, I've never really heard of anyone having theirs stolen), you just call it every couple of hours until the person who found it picks up. Then, you fling them a bit of cash or booze when you go to pick it up and everyone's happy.
Lol, I wonder why?
Maybe it’s time for more severe punishments for phone theft? The slap on the wrist thieves get today doesn’t seem like much of a deterrent, especially compared to the outsized harm this kind of crime causes to the victim as we rely more and more on smartphones for authentication.
The worst part is, I know this is a terrible idea, and yet I carry all my eggs in the very same basket.
At least I've had the good sense to leave my physical driver's licence in the car I use 99% of the time after we got a driver's licence app - I can now simply show the police my cellphone with a QR code and a control animation on it, and they can verify my licence class and expiry date on the spot.
Arguing for laws that are "tough on crime" is regressive and doesn't even solve the actual problem.
However, what would actually be nice if, like people here have suggested, is that the police would actually bum off to retrieve stolen phones, bikes, etc and then deliver whatever appropriate penalties to the perpetrators if found.
Doesn’t matter if it’s only a small punishment so long as people get their stuff back and the thieves learn they’ll be sought after.
So basically, we don’t need better laws here, simply enforcement of them.
(I think using this argument to justify being soft on crime is ridiculous. I'm just pointing out what the argument is.)
This is the actual problem. Theft is also a problem, but not all that relevant.
"Tough on crime" doesn't really prevent crime when the incentive to commit it is still probably higher than the disincentive no matter how "tough" and getting caught is still unlikely.
A trivial, but more relatable, example of this line of (criminal) reasoning is that people are more likely to enjoy extreme sports vs a high paying "dangerous job" despite working the job being less lethal, less accident prone, and a much greater net positive.
Anyway the regression is adding unnecessary laws.
There are definitely tough on crime laws that would solve or mostly solve the problem. Unfortunately these will mostly be cases of the cure being worse than the disease (e.g. panopticon with facial recognition and use of face coverings leading to jail time).
Yeah. Or the inclusion of accurate GPS trackers in each and every phone, so law enforcement could track them down. That would be truly dystopian!
Same for bike theft…
If they stand there, looking like a drug dealer, and you ask… all good.
If they ask you if you want coke, entrapment.
I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that, but the gist is "would you have committed the crime regardless of the actor's behavior."
In the 80s and 90s bait cars were ubiquitous in cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
Not necessarily. Even if we didn't catch any more criminals than we do now, you could probably reduce the problem a lot just by making sure the ones we do catch actually go to jail.
That's an argument for a phone not being the best 2FA mechanism. The argument for phones as 2FA isn't predicated on them being optimal, it's predicated on them being (1) present in almost all cases and (2) easily used.
Obviously yes, it would be safer if we'd all carry around password-locked yubikeys. But we aren't going to. We do have phones in our pockets, though.
We're talking about the case where the phone is stolen. There's almost no reason to steal an authentication device other than harassment or tactical delay of access.
- I have a cellular equipped Apple Watch and iPad that both independently get regular SMS messages along with my phone.
- I can sign into my Mac and get text messages.
- I have a second wallet in my bookbag with a few lesser used credit cards, a little cash and my passport card for ID
- my wife is my backup recovery source if I get locked out of my account.
Doesn't this actually depend on relaying the SMS from the phone? I don't think delivery works if your phone isn't in range of the laptop.
Even the watch seems to require the relay to work for receiving [1]:
> To receive SMS, MMS, or push notifications from third-party apps on your cellular Apple Watch, your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or cellular, but it doesn't need to be nearby. You also need to be signed in to iMessage on your iPhone to use Messages on your watch.
The Authenticator apps store keys in Secure Enclave (or at least I hope so). Which in themselves are 2fa by not being copyable thus requiring direct access to unlocked phone before using.
Of course that also comes with bigger risk of you locking yourself out, by forgetting Lock Screen password or phone getting bricked for some stupid reason. Printed paper don’t have that problem, except can also easily be lost.
Which is becoming less and less often in my experience. I was recently at an event that used SeatGeek for ticketing, and the only way they'd give you tickets was digitally through an iOS or Android app.
So don't do that. Always carry some cash and your debit and/or credit cards. Spread out the risk (especially when travelling).
> you lose access to your email/bank/github/etc. accounts protected by 2FA so you may not be able to work;
So don't do that. If you enable 2FA, have backups and recovery codes. Assume the phone will get lost at some point.
> you may lose your airline/train tickets (unless you have a physical copy with you) so you may not be able to travel.
So don't do that. When travelling I always take the printouts of the tickets along, even if I end up not needing them.
Don't turn your smartphone into your everything. Treat it as a tool which can get lost, stolen, or broken.
As an extreme example, my previous workplace had a "smart" lock on the door that could only be opened with a bluetooth-enabled smartphone and a dedicated app. It was immensely dumb and everyone hated it, but the owners thought they could save on keycards by doing this and so they did, because every employee had a smartphone anyways.
There is a massively more inconvenience (cost aside again) in having your phone stolen versus your car. It could upend your life a lot worse than having your wallet or laptop stolen as well.
There are only so much things we can expect from the average consumer and theft of a phone massively changes that persons life.
I’m for increasing the resources put into specifically phone theft.
My laptop was stolen from the airport (inside security!) and I had needle like precision with where the cops could find it. Nothing was done and I simply got back the insured value for it and the items with it. It put me out of work for the trip I was taking but I’m not your average consumer and everything was backed up and I did still have my phone. If my phone had been taken and not on me I would have been in a much larger world of pain (though I have backup codes, etc.).
I wonder if apps like Microsoft Authenticator are better for this. They sync 2fa codes to your Microsoft account. Naturally, the question becomes "Doesn't that make Microsoft a single point of failure? If someone know's your Microsoft password, they can get into your Authenticator and all your other accounts basically don't have 2FA anymore"
From what I can tell it doesn't look like Microsoft has an answer to this, unless there's something obvious I'm missing. On the bright side, though, if you lose your phone, your 2FA codes aren't lost.
Choices, choices.
This seems like a large amount of trust to be placing in Microsoft, since anyone with access to your account would also have access to your shared secret for every site. I would wager that they also would have access to your communications medium and password stores as well, in most cases, since you'd likey have bought in to the wider ecosystem.
Or do they encrypt it client side?
The Authenticator also has password vaulting features, but I agree that would be a bad idea for both your 2fa codes and your passwords to be in the same place (even worse if you use Outlook!)
> compared to the outsized harm this kind of crime causes to the victim as we rely more and more on smartphones for authentication.
For goodness sake, push back! I didn't even allow for the presumption I have a phone to read QR codes for restaurant menus, because of where I saw that was heading. Never allow anyone or any place to presume they can rely on your smartphone for something they should be responsible for.
I noticed places I work for started to try this, and put a stop to it right from the beginning by asking if they were going to start paying for my phone contract, and buy the phone from me, so I could buy another private one. Putting it in black and white makes it clear what's going on; which is work trying to get (a) free hardware, services, and (b) free work out of hours.
A phone at least has the benefit of being backed up. In theory, I could log into a couple accounts on a brand new phone and have access to everything within tens of minutes. Contrast to the hours of phone calls and weeks of waiting it takes if I lost my driver's license, passport, etc.
And though a phone can be used for payments, it must be unlocked. Not true of the physical credit/debit cards (swipe or tap) or cash found in a wallet/purse.
If you have non-backed-up 2FA tied to your phone, you should fix that. Batteries die, and phones can be physically damaged, bricked for some software reason (they're computers, after all), dropped into the ocean or off a cliff, or just legitimately lost (ie: falls out of pocket into the cracks of a car seat and battery dies).
I won't weigh into the punishment-deterrent argument at all, I'm merely pointing out that in theory there's actually a lot less disruption having your phone stolen vs having a wallet/purse stolen. Both suck, of course. Replacing a phone is almost certainly more expensive, but it should be significantly faster to recover from. And backup your 2FA.
1. Find My Phone is great, you can remote lock, wipe, and mostly importantly, add a custom message. The message I wrote for the cab driver in Mexico is /very/ different than what my default message would've been.
2. Don't get over-zealous about revoking Device Admin permissions. If you remove that privilege for Find My Phone, then it can't *really* lock down the phone the way you'd like (and probably can't initiate the full remote wipe). It's odd, it definitely puts the phone into a state where it looks and feels locked, but you can swipe down, access settings, get into the Google Account area and unlock it.
Bonus thought for nomady/travely types:
3. Having your wallet stolen is damn near a living nightmare, especially if you're traveling or... 12 hours out from boarding a flight out of the country. Tips: Some credit card apps will let you access a "virtual number", and in lieu of that, a friend with a debit card can WesternUnion/MoneyGram you money nearly instantly (assuming you have some way of contacting them - without a phone / whatsapp contact, etc, that can be challenging - thank god I know my parent's cell phone numbers by heart)
Last random thought -- I carry a bag/purse/fannypack on me basically always. From now on my new wallet has a keychain loop and is wallet-chained into my purse so I can't set it down accidentally. Maybe even something similar with a soon-to-be Pixel 7 Mini hopefully. The hassle is one thing, the inner shame and self-annoyance is another.
- First, I think one of the weak spots is people having way too big phones for what any single hand of theirs can confidently cling on to
- Secondly, I think some paranoia-like awareness of your surroundings whenever you're outside is more warranted than people want to accept. This includes a quick look up from your phone and at the people all around yourself every few seconds
- Third, to the prospective thief: I don't think a bicycle is a great choice to try and steal my phone on in a fully crowded city like friggin London. I sure as hell will catch up to you sprinting on my feet quicker than you can get the hell out of the area without crashing
An e-bike already moving at speed on a roadway is going to outpace pretty much any human very fast. You have no chance to catch up in the submission post's described scenario, IMO. Once they're out of sight the game is over.
But if you mean those e-scooters, then those aren't significantly faster than bicycles and would have to yield to car traffic soon enough for me to catch up on foot.
Covid and the rise of ebikes have helped the crooks. Face coverings are more acceptable and silent ebikes can creep up on someone on a sidewalk and provide a sudden burst of acceleration to get away.
If they do bypass the activation lock and resell it, anyone buying a second hand device or parts can check it and the seller reported to local law enforcement for selling stolen goods.
In fact, I think this is why organised operations quickly ship stolen phones abroad: the EMEI may be blocked and tracked in UK/EU but it won't be in China...
Are they actually legit (assuming a big seller, not a 20-star account), or are they "laundered" stolen phones?
A lot of them have Chinese ROMs, are they the reverse: stolen in China and sold abroad? Or just arbitrage of regional pricing?
It requires a 'clean' serial, WiFi MAC, and Bluetooth MAC, the three things a WiFi only device uses to authenticate to Apple during setup.
iPhones and other cellular connected devices? Nah, not gonna happen, though there are weird jailbreak-esque 'bypasses' that will get the phone past setup, albeit still 'locked' when you reset.
https://www.ft.com/content/4609e212-eb64-11dd-bb6e-0000779fd...
It's too bad there isn't yet (?) to my knowledge a police unit that specializes on quickly responding to theft of trackable items.
It seems it would be rather easy to take out the entire operation.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's how it works. I had a Galaxy S1 stolen once, when it was already quite old. A friend of mine had his GS7 stolen, also several years old and in quite bad shape.
I think thieves will just act on an opportunity and see later if the device is worth anything.
Yeah, I used to have a rusty roadbike that looked so unattractive I thought it’s like ontouchable and I found the solution to bike theft. Nevertheless, one day a thick chain was cut and the bike was gone. So, yes, anything gets stolen
The phone may not be, in itself, expensive, so a painful loss if it came to be stolen (or otherwise no longer available - say you break / lose it). But since more and more things are tied to it, it can be a giant PITA to lose it. For example, my bank accounts 2FA is tied to it, and they specifically don't allow having multiple phones. If my phone is lost, I have to physically visit a branch office to reset it.
Why would you want to live in a place like that? I can't think of a single city in Australia where that would be a concern.
Also, immigration isn't always trivial. As a European, I would have to jump through multiple hoops to be able to move to AU/NZ, for example.
As a European, sure. But I'm not suggesting AU/NZ is the only area in the world that is low crime. I'd imagine with a European passport you have access to many countries with low crime rate areas with little effort, no?
I suspect the contrary. People seem very keen to stick around family and friends, and tend to prefer to not make major changes. Whenever I suggest such an option (move countries, not necessarily continents), people always seem dismissive. However, I expect this to be somewhat local / culture-based.
The issue is that these areas are usually the big cities where people will tend to flock for the jobs. Sure, their small towns might be quiet, but there's no work there, especially if you want a more "intellectual" kind of job. I'm curious how this will change with the rise of work from home, though. I know many people who've moved out of Paris to random tiny towns thanks to this. So, moves are being made. But crime has been increasing in smaller towns, too...
> I'd imagine with a European passport you have access to many countries with low crime rate areas with little effort, no?
I honestly don't know which countries those would be. Especially since they shouldn't be on a path such that, a year or two down the line, they'd resemble my current country, France, which mostly excludes the rest of the EU.
As regards the passport, it should allow me to move there for an indefinite amount of time, and ideally allow me to work from there. Mostly, an EU passport allows me to visit many places, but not settle (I don't qualify for the "rich people" visas).
For me, keeping myself and my family feeling safe (and that safety being based on the reality around me) is a non negotiable.
So total price was $130 but I am using the 5gb of data as a hotspot for my laptop this weekend anyways.
It also came off as wide eyed to keep referring to the thief as "they", most certainly the thief on the bike was a guy and keeping this in mind can be useful information and should have been at the top of this person's "pro tips".
I used to cycle to work down a pavement which was divided into half for walking on and half cycle lane. I lost count of the number of times I had to swerve round people strolling along [often in the dedicated cycle lane part] with their phone either clamped to the side of their head or held out in front of them watching something on screen --completely oblivious to the world around them.
If I'd been of a criminal disposition, I could have trivially plucked the phones from these people's hands and been away and out of reach before they even realised what was going on. And I could have harvested 3 or 4 phones every day this way. And that's, just commuting to work, not actually seeking out victims.
I generally have sympathy for anyone who gets their 'stuff' stolen. But not much I'm afraid for the kind of people who can't even walk down the street without their fucking phone permanently attached to their face. Completely ignorant of the fact they're getting in other people's way and almost causing accidents, wherever they go.
I don’t know if it’s still happening now. It’s either not in the news or I’ve been oblivious to it.
Any person who finds it can be expected to make some small effort to return it. Dropping it off at lost & found items is already pushing it.
IMHO in locked state it should have a button to call the carrier and the carrier should make an effort to register a phone number, email or address. Iphones do have a lost mode but I've never seen it in action.
A found phone is essentially a brick without any visible id code.
So the real world process is now like that of all other dumb luggage. It goes to lost & found, you register the loss and wait for it to be found, dropped off, registered, if the item matches your description you get 5 days to pick it up where it was found, then it is send to a central location which could take a good while! Then you pay 15 euro to have it send back to you. Bank and id cards are destroyed. But how do you identify a brick? Expect to be without a phone for at least a week.
You could be standing there in front of the closed doors but there is no way to return your belongings.
There remains much to do in this service area.
If there is a standard finders reward it might even be worth it for the thief to return it. I'd much rather pay say 30 bucks to get it back. The thief just switches it off and has it stripped for parts. If the standard reward is good enough people will make a serious effort getting it back to you.
Truly wild would be if it could use the back camera to continuously scan a crowd to identify its owner. Draw boxes around the faces with a different color and a bleep for potential candidates so that one can walk towards them.
Display a name or id number to broadcast over the train station, mall or airport announcement system.
Also extra handy: I can make it ring _even if silent with my one-plus physical silent switch on_. I'd not actually worked out how to do that before, and it has been very annoying the odd time I lose it and it's silent.
Very good.
Also, don't thieves usually turn off the phone immediately so you can't track anything.
Clearly there is some factory there accepting tons of stolen phones.
Don't want to spoil anything, but locked down phone doesn't always mean it's a brick :-)
Your best hope is basically not to have your phone stolen.
Demo site: https://thread.choomba.one/
Seemingly. From the U.S. agreement:
https://aigtheftandloss.com/static/media/ExNY.72830d3f.pdf
"If service is not available for the Equipment in a country outside of the United States, You may be responsible for shipping and handling charges to facilitate service to a country where service is available. If You seek service in a country that is outside of the United States, You will comply with all applicable import and export laws and regulations and be responsible for all custom duties, V.A.T. and other associated taxes and charges."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/apple-iph...
"Thefts of iPhones in London fell by 24% in the first five months of 2014 compared to 2013, while in San Francisco they fell by 38%, and in New York by 19%, according to data from the New York attorney general's 'Secure Our Smartphones' initiative, following the introduction of the kill switch – officially called "activation lock" – feature in the iOS 7 mobile software which lets owners remotely wipe and lock their phones if they are stolen."