A new approach to Re: Itch3: Anti-lost/theft protection
Attila Csipa
plists at prometheus.org.yu
Wed Feb 28 20:54:55 CET 2007
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.
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