phonetics

[calimac]

So the Supremes have ruled that police need a warrant to search a smartphone.  Or any cell phone, I guess.  I don't have a smartphone; I have a dumb phone: all it has on it are my phone calls.  Part of the reason I don't have a smartphone is I don't want to entrust so much of my life to one little gadget easily stolen or lost.  I still use a physical datebook/address book, and it's tough enough keeping track of that.  Apparently cops could search that, but not if I entrusted it all to a smart phone.  But what about a tablet computer, like my Nook Color?  I use that for e-mail and web browsing when I'm on a trip, but I leave the e-mail on the server and I don't store the password.

Recently there's been much talk of installing kill switches on smartphones.  Perhaps through ignorance of smartphones, I have some questions about how this works, some matters I find baffling.  I brought one of these up on an online comments section, and was told the question was stupid.  It may be stupid, but I still don't know the answer.

1) The purpose of the kill switch is to discourage theft of smartphones.  So how is the thief supposed to know, before trying to steal the phone, whether it's equipped with a kill switch or not?  This is essentially the same question I once asked of someone who said her uncle's store kept getting robbed until he bought a gun, after which he was left in peace.  How did the robbers know he had a gun?  Did he brandish it all the time?  Did he put a sign in the window reading, "These premises protected by nut with gun"?  What?  I never got an answer.

2) How does the kill switch work, exactly?  I looked up "kill switch" on Wikipedia, and found photos and descriptions of big red emergency stop buttons on train engines, that sort of thing.  I doubt that smartphone kill switches work that way, but there's no description of how they do work.  OK, so let's say you have a smartphone with a kill switch, and someone steals it.  You want to activate the kill switch.  You can't use anything on the smartphone itself; it's been stolen.  So what do you use?

3) Does activating the kill switch involve using a password of any kind?  If so, that opens up vast new fields of worms.  How do you remember a password you hope never to have to use?  If you write it down on a piece of paper in your wallet, what happens if you're mugged of your smartphone and the mugger takes your wallet as well?  If the smartphone comes with the kill switch default enabled, does it have a preset password?  Do you have any idea how much trouble has been caused already by software with default passwords?  Operating systems with a preset password of PASSWORD or something like that, which the sysops neglected to change.  If sysops can't be bothered to change these, why would phone users be likely to?  I foresee vast hackage.

4) Is there an "undo" command of any kind for the kill switch?  If not, even if you recover your phone you've lost your data, unless you've backed it up somewhere.  (Can smartphones do that?  On my home computer, I can backup my documents, but not always programs I've downloaded; they need more than the .exe file to work.  What about smartphone apps?)  If there is one, I foresee more hackage and the crumbling of the whole reason for creating the kill switch in the first place.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Like Lisa, I have heard anecdotal reports that smart phone thefts have dropped due to other security features being enabled (e.g., needing to re-enter a password before being able to reset anything major, thus making it difficult for a thief to disable or re-use the phone).

I have an iPhone, and the rest of what she said applies to it as well: logging on to a website to remotely wipe the phone, backing up data to the cloud so it could be restored.