Smartphone Thefts Way Down

It’s a tough time to be in the business of stealing smartphones.

Apple started letting users clear their data and disable their iPhones remotely in 2013 with its “Find My iPhone” feature, and Android is expected to build in the function soon. That makes it harder for thieves to do much with a stolen smartphone: If it doesn’t work, it’s not worth an awful lot on the black market.

Now, that technology appears to be turning away would-be thieves: A third fewer Americans say they had phones stolen last year compared to 2013, according to a new study by Consumer Reports.

An estimated 2.1 million Americans had their phones stolen last year, down from 3.1 million in 2013.

The magazine says it tweaked its methodology in the latest study, which could account for some of the change, but that the overall change is still significant.

That’s what prosecutors and policymakers hoped for as they’ve pushed for “kill switches” to become standard in smartphones. The issue has inspired legislation in Congress (though it hasn’t moved out of committee) and laws in states such as Minnesota and California, particularly as phone thefts soared in recent years. The number of Americans whose phones were stolen doubled between 2012 and 2013, according to the magazine.

Those laws concerned privacy activists, who said kill switches could be used improperly, especially if wiping a stolen phone becomes compulsory. They worry that law-enforcement agencies, for example, could abuse such features when targeting a suspect.

In a statement, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office planned to keep pushing phone makers to make the technology standard: “This new report confirms what our office found earlier this year: the introduction of ‘kill switches’ in cell phones – resulting from pressure brought by my office, the San Francisco DA, and countless law enforcement officials and consumer advocates who joined the coalition – led to a staggering drop in smartphone thefts.”

Kill-switch advocates like Schneiderman will be eyeing Android’s new Lollipop 5.1 operating system when it rolls out later this summer to see if the function is headed to Android phones. Until it is, some Android users have found similar protection through third-party apps.

But as Consumer Reports’ Calla Deitrick points out, even if it does, it might take a while for the technology to get to all users.

“Given the helter-skelter, one-off approach phone companies take to their mobile operating systems, however, it will be a long time before a kill switch comes to all Android models,” Deitrick reports.