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The British government weighs forcing phone companies to add anti-theft protections
Minister Sarah Jones warned there could be a law if cellphone theft does not decline. According to data cited in an official letter, cases in London fell 18.7% over the past year, although the government is pressing for further progress.
The government of the United Kingdom is considering moving ahead with a law to require phone companies to incorporate technical measures against cellphone theft if there are no further improvements in reducing those crimes, according to the BBC.
Security Minister Sarah Jones said in a letter to the Science and Technology Committee that the Home Office has so far chosen to work collaboratively with major technology companies, but left open the possibility of legislation if she is not satisfied with the pace of results.
According to the BBC, Jones said her goal is to reduce the share of stolen devices that can be reused or reactivated, on the premise that if a stolen phone cannot be reactivated, its value and the incentive to steal it also fall.
In that same letter, published last week and first reported by The Times according to the BBC, the minister said there were 14,700 cellphone thefts in London over the past year, a drop of 18.7%. She said the decline is positive, although she stressed that she wants additional reductions.
According to the BBC, officials in the area are also working on new rules that could establish a technical anti-theft standard. Jones warned that if at some point she is not satisfied with the progress, the government will move forward through the legislative route.
The debate comes months after the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, called for all companies to be required to turn stolen phones into unusable devices. In remarks to the BBC in June, he said the market for stolen cellphones depends on security flaws that allow devices to be reset with illegal software and resold as new.
Rowley added then that Apple had managed to solve that engineering problem and that, since then, the vast majority of phones stolen in London had not been reset. In his view, that shows that this type of security has an impact.
The BBC also recalled that the Science and Technology Committee investigated cellphone theft last year. In a hearing, Conservative MP Kit Malthouse asked whether companies were delaying measures because of a commercial incentive, noting that phones worth 50 million pounds are stolen in London each year. The companies rejected that accusation.
After Jones’s letter, Samsung said it is fully committed to protecting its customers and that it introduced several security improvements to address the problem. Among them, it mentioned Factory Reset Protection, Identity Check and Security Delay, according to the BBC.
Apple UK, for its part, said it works in close contact with the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office and defended the security tools it already offers, such as Find My, Lost Mode, Stolen Device Protection, Activation Lock and Activation Lock for parts, according to the BBC.
Sources
About this note. Written by El Notero with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on what was published by the cited outlet. El Notero did not conduct its own reporting on this event.
