On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a piece of
legislation mandating that all smartphones come with kill-switch
software automatically installed so that a user can remotely wipe his or
her device if it gets stolen. The bill will affect all smartphones manufactured after July 1, 2015 to be sold in California.
After that date, new smartphones will prompt users to set up a wiping
feature, but users will be able to opt out as well. As part of the
legislation, anyone caught selling stolen phones will be fined a civil
penalty of between $500 and $2,500.
As Ars noted two weeks ago
when the bill passed the state senate, the legislation's supporters
included the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, and San
Francisco, as well as several consumer unions, police groups, and the
Utility Reform Network. Its opponents included a couple of municipal
Chambers of Commerce, the wireless industry lobby CTIA, and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The California government hopes to cut down on phone theft, and laws
like this tend to spread to other states if manufacturers decide that
the cost of making the change for one state is high enough to extend the
change to all states. “Starting next year, all smartphones sold in
California, and most likely every other state in the union, will come
equipped with theft deterrent technology when they purchase new phones,”
Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said in a press release today.
The same press release noted that Apple, AT&T, Blackberry,
Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Verizon all removed their opposition to
the bill. Smartphone companies originally opposed the bill saying that
the kill switch could be used by malicious hackers, but the same
companies were also in a position to gain considerably from passively allowing theft due to deals with device insurance companies.
The EFF has also opposed the bill
(and remains opposed to the law), saying that companies like Find my
iPhone and Lookout already offer the option to wipe a phone to
consumers. The digital civil liberties group also says that it's unclear
from the legislation whether government actors could authorize turning
the kill-switch on a phone.
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