The Times reported recently on a mission by Sarah Maguire, a 26-year-old yoga instructor who drove 30 miles to Covina, California from her home in Los Angeles to confront a thief who stole her iPhone.
Maguire, who located the phone via the Find My iPhone app on her computer, tracked the phone to a house on a quiet residential street. She knocked on the door. A large man, about 30, answered. “I think you have my iPhone,” she told him. The man produced Maguire’s phone and a second one that belonged to her roommate but not before denying he had taken them and closing the blinds in the living room, a gesture that creeped out Maguire. “When I told my mom what I did, she thought I was crazy,” Maguire recalled.
More people are following Maguire’s lead and resorting to self-help to get their phones back, according to the Times. Not suprisingly, law enforcement personnel advise against the practice. “It’s just a phone — it’s not worth losing your life over,” Commander Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, told the paper.
In my case the decision not to track down my missing iPhone was easy. That’s because my phone turned up in Algiers, where it last appeared on April 20, according to an email I received in April from Apple. In the Alergerian capital’s southeastern suburbs, along a highway that parallels the Mediterranean, the phone signaled its location.
I last held the phone, a black iPhone 5, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Paris. My partner and I had used the device to take photos from the back seat of a taxi that drove us from a hotel near the Palais de Congrés that we had checked out of to one in the Marais district. Shortly after entering our room we realized that somewhere along the way we had lost not just my phone but my partner’s iPhone too.
Calls to the taxi company, our former hotel and the organizers of a conference that my partner had attended produced no information about the devices’ whereabouts. That’s when I activated Find My iPhone.
The service turned up nothing. In the months since my partner and I have wondered occasionally what had become of the phones, which seemed to vanish like some pocket-size version of Malaysia Airlines Flight 730. Thus the email that arrived in April startled me. “Allah inoub kho was found near Inter Ouartier Route Algiers at 4:02 a.m.,” read the message. “Your iPhone’s last reported location will be available for 24 hours.”
On its journey from the French capital the phone seems to have received a new name, which translates loosely as “Allah is the greatest.” That’s all the information I have. The phone hasn’t checked in with Apple since then.
We live in world where, thanks to technology, our phones can ping us from anywhere. We can view maps that will pinpoint street corners and outposts where we’ve never set foot. Yet the technology confirms what we already knew intuitively. Our phone is somewhere else, just not where we happen to be.
Phones may be capable of being tracked, but that doesn’t make them less likely to be stolen. More than 3.1 million smartphones were stolen last year, nearly double the number swiped in 2012, according to Consumer Reports. Many of the phones lifted end up overseas where a market for them thrives, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told Consumers.
Though many owners use Find My iPhone and other apps to block their phones, the barriers provide little protection in the black market. An investigation by the BBC this spring found at least eight shops in London that trade in stolen smartphones. All the phones that trafickers described to the BBC had blocking. Thieves defeat the blocking by changing the phones’ International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, a number that is stamped in the battery compartments of most smartphones.
All the phones used had ‘find-my-phone’ style blocks activated, and in theory their IMEI numbers mean they are not useable once reported stolen.
But Grant Roughley, of Essential Forensics, demonstrated to the BBC how simple it was to get around such features – using only a laptop.
He was able to give a device a new IMEI number – effectively changing the phone’s fingerprint – meaning it could be used as normal.
And restoring the phone’s default software removes “find-my-phone” protection.
Mr Roughley said: “Just a few mouse clicks and the phone is turned from a paperweight back to a useable device again. A phone stolen this morning could be back on the streets by this afternoon, packaged up as a second hand legitimate phone.”
Wireless carriers have said that starting in the middle of next year, smartphones sold in the U.S. will have a feature that enables users to erase the data in their phone remotely. However, even if the service works as billed it won’t address the problem of phones that leave the U.S. and become reactiviated abroad by carriers that don’t participate in the system, Consumers notes.
Some members of Congress agree. In February, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that would require phones to have a so-called “kill switch” that would enable the owner to erase the device’s data remotely, render the phone inoperable and prevent the phone from being reprogrammed or reactivated without an authorization from its owner.
“Under the requirements of the bill, if the kill switch is activated, there is nothing for international carriers to do because they won’t be able to turn the device back on,” Serrano told Consumers. A similar measure pending in the California Assembly would go a step further by requiring that smartphones sold in the state be sold with the kill switch turned on so that consumers won’t have to do anything to secure their devices.
In the meantime, Allah inoub kho belongs to someone else. My latest phone is a robin’s-egg blue iPhone 5C, which I like very much. Both my former phone and I have moved on.