US senators to bring law to fight data breach from smartphone thefts
17 Feb 2014
The rise in the incidence of mobile devices theft all across the US has prompted several senators to introduce a smartphone kill switch on the federal level.
On Thursday, a proposed law called the Smartphone Theft Prevention Act was introduced by Democratic senators Barbara Mikulski, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Mazie Hirono.
According to senator Amy Klobuchar who was the founder of the bill, cell phone theft had become a big business for thieves looking to cash in on these devices and any valuable information they contained, costing consumers more than $30 billion every year and endangering countless theft victims thedroidguy.com reported.
Sen Klobuchar added the legislation would help eliminate the incentives for criminals to target smartphones by empowering victims to take steps to keep their information private; protect their identity and finances; and render the phone inoperable to the thieves.
It was reported earlier last week that California state senator Mark Leno proposed a new legislation (Senate Bill 962) that would require all smartphones sold in the state of California to have a kill switch by 1 January, 2015.
While the implementation, in this case would be limited to California, the new Smartphone Theft Prevention Act would require all smartphones sold in the US to have a kill switch.
According to a recent FCC report, one-third of thefts in the US involved smartphones, with the figure rising to one-half in most major cities like New York.
When the law finally goes into effect, cellphone users would have no reason to worry about loss of their data.
The kill switch would make it harder for criminals to use and resell the smartphone as deactivation of the device would render it useless even if it was restored to factory settings.
Meanwhile, the mobile industry has expressed concern over the kill switches, on worries that hackers could disable a large number of phones at a time.
Currently Apple's smartphones come with an Activation lock feature in the iOS 7 system, which works on the lines of a kill switch.
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