Earlier this week, UK Members of Parliament and the Metropolitan Police held a listening to throughout which they accused Apple and Google of cashing in on stolen smartphones and never doing sufficient to forestall the thefts to start with.
In keeping with Newsweek, smartphone theft in London spiked 25% from 2023 to 2024. Police tallied 80,000 stolen telephones in London alone in 2024. Wow!
Police estimate as a lot as £50 million is generated yearly by promoting these stolen units on the black market in locations like Algeria, China, and Hong Kong. Though the telephones themselves could also be bought overseas, the proceeds generated are funding organized crime inside the UK.
The Metropolitan Police need Apple and Google to forestall stolen smartphones from using both firm’s cloud storage, a transfer they consider will devalue the telephones and curb theft. The Met believes the identical Worldwide Cell Tools Identification quantity (IMEI — a 15-digit serial quantity assigned to each cellular machine) used to trace the telephones after the theft can be utilized to dam the telephone’s entry to any cloud companies.
Gary Davis, Apple’s world senior director for privateness and legislation enforcement requests, took a grilling on the listening to. In response to the proposed IMEI lock, Davis cautioned such a transfer may create different fraud vectors for smartphone customers. Davis mentioned:
We see intensive fraud makes an attempt. Each month, over 1,000 folks attempt to imitate you, me, different folks right here to hunt knowledge from us and to delete your accounts. They do it for malicious functions. They do it so as to then possibly blackmail you. We see these assault vectors on an ongoing foundation…
Committee members accused Apple and Google of dragging their ft in addition to cashing in on the thefts claiming Apple and Google profit from paid companies used on stolen telephones along with new telephone gross sales to the sufferer. Davis wasn’t having it. He mentioned in response: “I believe it’s a little bit unfair. It’s mandatory for me to refute the suggestion that we someway profit from our customers struggling the traumatic occasion of getting their telephones stolen and being disconnected from their lives. We’ve got invested many a whole lot of tens of millions in designing in protections.”
Apple and Google have protections in place through Apple’s Discover My and Android’s Discover My System apps whereby the sufferer can find and remotely wipe their smartphones to guard their knowledge. Apple’s Activation Lock, which is routinely enabled when Discover My is turned on, additionally prevents a stolen iPhone from being reactivated, successfully turning it right into a brick and rendering the bigger query of blocking IMEI entry to Apple’s cloud companies irrelevant. With iPhone 15 and later fashions, even the components are Activation Locked.
However, representatives from each firms did appear a bit evasive when it got here to the final word query of utilizing the IMEI quantity to limit the provisioning of companies to a stolen telephone.
However is the answer so simple as the parliament members and Met Police say? Not based on Simon Westgrove, Google’s software program engineering supervisor. On the listening to Westgrove appears to counsel an IMEI block would require broader trade cooperation, stating: “The IMEI is definitely the identifier for the enterprise relationship that the provider has with the sufferer of theft. The IMEI represents that relationship. Our relationship with the consumer is thru the Google account.”
For now, the Metropolitan Police are left with quick e-bikes to catch smartphone thieves. Since about 80% of the stolen telephones in London are iPhones, it is smart Apple is within the crosshairs. Is there a industrial incentive for each Apple and Google to not take the motion requested on the listening to? Actually some. If there’s a manner we are able to stop stolen smartphones from being reused in any type, it definitely is smart to me. So, what’s the holdup?