Smartphone theft now makes up 30 to 40 percent of robberies in the country, according to the Federal Trade Commission - with a rate as high as 66 percent in San Francisco - and affected 1.6 million Americans in 2012 alone, Consumer Reports said. Gascón and Scheniderman are two of the leading state regulators aggressively pushing for more antitheft measures around the smartphone market. Schneiderman in a joint statement released Friday. "While we are concerned that consumers will need to opt-in to the system, thereby limiting the ubiquity and effectiveness of the solution, the fact that Samsung and these carriers have agreed to work together to make Find My Mobile and Reactivation Lock available sends a strong message that all participants in this industry can indeed work together to make their customers safer," wrote San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric T. In this case, the features are now available on the Galaxy S5 out of the box and can be activated for free, but are still opt-in measures. Lawmakers are putting pressure on handset makers and carriers to eliminate one, if not more, of these hurdles on the user end, thereby attempting to disincentivize criminals from committing smartphone theft. In most cases, these services must be either downloaded from their respective app stores and synced up with one's account through the Web or proactively turned on in settings and kept activated to remain effective. Hands-on: Samsung Galaxy S5 has tepid design, but plenty of specs appeal.Keep your phone from getting stolen (and what to do if it is).Calif., carriers headed for battle over 'kill switch' bill.Senators propose smartphone antitheft 'kill switch' bill.Reactivation Lock is a feature that detects abnormal attempts to reset a device to factory settings by prompting one to login even after a successful reset.
The Korean company's flagship smartphone became available for preorder on Verizon's Web site Friday with an official launch date of April 11.įind My Mobile - similar to Apple's Find My iPhone service that has aided authorities in tracking down stolen iOS devices - is an online service that can track and lock a stolen phone, wipe it clean, and alert the owner when a different SIM card is inserted.
GET SMART SCROLL ON VERIZON S5 ANDROID
That's precisely why carriers Verizon and US Cellular have teamed up with Samsung to ensure that the Android device maker's Find My Mobile and Reactivation Lock antitheft features are now preloaded - in other words already installed out of the box - on its new Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone. In the last few years, the oftentimes violent act has been quickly eclipsing all other forms of robbery in the US thanks to the lucrative secondhand market for stolen smartphones. Smartphone theft, in the words of lawmakers grappling with the crime, has reached "epidemic" levels.
0 kommentar(er)
