A new approach to Re: Itch3: Anti-lost/theft protection

[Attila Csipa]

A lot of ideas have been written on anti theft protection, but much of it from 
a geek/user's standpoint, and almost completely forgetting the possible 
ramifications of the suggested techniques. First of all, none of the 
techniques presented PROTECT your phone from being stolen (they fall more to 
the find-your-lost-phone category). Second, in most countries I know of you 
cannot act on your own without the help/presence of law enforcement persons. 
Although this may sound strange and ineffective at first, it makes a lot of 
sense from a police perspective. What would you do if you confronted a 
criminal who stole your phone ? What if he is dangerous ? What if you get 
hurt in the process ? What if the person who has the phone and whom you are 
shouting at/calling a thief is actually innocent and knows nothing of the 
origin of the phone ? Which brings us to the next concern - stolen phones 
usually do not get regularly used by the persons who actually stole them, and 
most certainly not used by their money - their SIMs are just as stolen. They 
might drain your account with expensive calls, but chances are high that the 
phone will soon get sold through ads and/or ebay. If the persons in charge do 
this 'professionally' they will surely flash the phone (the Neo1973 is here 
at a little advantage by not being a widespread/common phone). Thus there is 
no guarantee that you are spending the thiefs money - in fact, it is much 
more probable that you are tracking and wasting an unsuspecting victims 
money. How would you feel if you bought a slightly used Neo1973 only to find 
out that it is sending expensive foreign/roaming SMS-es because the previous 
owner 'forgot' to turn off a silent alarm/anti theft application ? As you can 
see the problem of phone theft is not that simple as relaying coordinates 
back to yourself - a much broader topic must be analysed to tackle this 
issue - and although the GPS might help a little, it is not really a silver 
bullet in this matter.