As of July 1st, both Minnesota and California passed laws requiring manufacturers to install an anti-theft feature known as a ‘kill switch’ on all new smartphones. A kill switch allows the owner of a stolen phone to remotely delete all the data on the device or simply lock the phone, rendering the device useless to the thief and lowering its resale value – in slang terms, to ‘brick’ the phone. 

According to Consumer Reports, approximately 2.1 million smartphones were stolen int the U.S. in 2014, significantly reduced from the 3.1 million smartphones stolen in 2013. The practice of stealing iPhones is so prevalent that such theft has become known as ‘apple picking.’ Forbes attributes the significant decline in smartphone theft to the prevalence of kill switch technology. Apple added a kill switch to its Find My iPhone app in 2013 and last September, started making its kill switch opt-out on all phones running iOS 8, meaning the feature was activated by default on all new phones. After kill switch technology became a standard feature on iPhones, PC Mag reported that between January 2013 and December 2014, iPhone theft dropped 25 percent in New York City and 40 percent in San Francisco. According to William Duckworth, a statistics and data science professor at Creighton University, kill switch technology could eventually save consumers $2.6 billion. 

In October of last year, Android’s operating system Lollipop added a kill switch feature but left it opt-in, meaning it was turned off by default. If you have the latest Android Lollipop OS, its version of the kill switch is called Factory Reset Protection, found in Settings. Should the next update to Lollipop make the remote kill switch a default setting?

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