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Depends if Sony is hosting them or not (this is only partially a joke)

I saw the same sentence but I just laughed - I read that as "your crappy provider has to somehow enable this, which they're obviously not going to bother doing".

There needs to be another party in there to communicate with the phone regardless, right? I simply interpret that quote to mean you can use the "switch" with a 3rd party service like Android Device Manager / Cerberus, that Qualcomm is not operating directly.

Actually, looking at the video it appears they're partnering with https://www.lookout.com/ for this.

Intel's been offering that for some of their processors for quite some time (vPro)... also third party provider, I believe they inject a rootkit into Windows upon bootup. But you can (supposedly) irreversibly disable it fortunately.

That, plus backdoor access by your favorite, 3-letter govt agency.