Kill Switch Is No Dead Certainty to Stop Phone Theft

The phone-locking kill switch has been widely hailed as a powerful deterrent to phone theft. In July, California became the first state to require that new smartphones be sold with such technology enabled by default. Introduced by Apple in September 2013, it has shown promise in reducing rampant iPhone robbery in cities like San Francisco, New York and London. But new phone-theft data and the appearance of so-called bricked phones for sale online, suggest that at least some thieves aren’t deterred by the antitheft technology.

In Seattle, iPhone thefts and robberies leapt by more than 30 percent in the year after the Apple kill switch, or activation lock, was introduced. An antitheft feature for Android phones was introduced earlier in 2015. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who championed the California law, said theft and robbery numbers will plummet across the board once phones with kill switches enabled by default are in broad circulation. For older iPhones, the kill-switch capability must be set up by owners. “Will it go away 100 percent? Probably not,” said Mr. Gascón. “What it is doing is reducing it so substantially that it’s not the epidemic that we saw.”