Smartphone Users Must Be Able to Easily Wipe Data When Devices Are Stolen, Says FCC Chief
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will write the CEOs of wireless carriers, large and small, and ask them to respond within 30 days with “measurable implementation plans” for combating smartphone theft, he said Thursday at a meeting of the agency’s Technological Advisory Council (TAC) at FCC headquarters. He also said regulation remains a possibility if industry doesn’t step up to protect consumers. “When industry is taking care of things, we don’t have to,” he said.
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Mobile device theft has been a top focus for the TAC and for Wheeler throughout the year (see 1403110031). The group released a report Thursday, which Wheeler described as the most thorough ever written on the topic. As part of his communications with the CEOs, Wheeler said he plans to forward the report.
Wheeler said he will ask the CEOs to emphasize the importance of allowing all consumers to lock, wipe and restore data on stolen smartphones. “Nothing new has to be invented,” he said. “This is something that should be mandatory on all phones.” He said he also plans to press the CEOs to make phones more secure with a unique fingerprint. Wheeler also will ask the CEOs to improve the use of data to stop the reuse of stolen phones, he said.
Wheeler said he's hearing about the problem of mobile device theft from Congress and regulators in other countries. He congratulated TAC, saying it issued the report in a matter of months following 80 conference calls by members. “It proves the power of getting together the people who know what’s going on,” he said. “This is a national problem that requires a national solution.” The report offers a “road map” for a national solution, he added.
The report formally recommends the steps highlighted by Wheeler, including making lock/wipe/restore functionality a mandatory feature of every phone that carriers sell and that it be a default feature that does not require consumers to opt in.
Recommendations include that the FCC establish a “common national framework” for smartphone anti-theft measures, based in part on CTIA’s “Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment” and laws in place in California and Minnesota. The report said solutions should be technologically neutral “allowing the industry to identify and evolve the technical approaches for solutions to meet the functional requirements for smartphone anti-theft capabilities without limiting innovation by solution providers in a competitive market.”
TAC recommended Wheeler work with regulators in other countries on mobile phone theft. TAC also backed a clearinghouse of information and expertise on mobile device theft for the use of police, similar to the National Mobile Phone Crime Unit in the U.K.
The report said much work remains and there are no hard numbers of the actual smartphone thefts in the U.S. each year. A TAC working group had been unable to obtain “definitive information on the destination of the millions of stolen smartphones,” the report said. “Anecdotal information seems to strongly suggest that at least a subset of the stolen smartphones are being exported from the United States to countries that are both geographically and politically remote from the U.S.,” the report said. “This underscores that fact that smartphone theft is an international issue which will ultimately require multi-national coordination.”
The working group got preliminary data from 21 police jurisdictions, which indicate a 2013 phone theft rate of 368.9 thefts per 100,000 individuals, the report said. That would mean national thefts considerably lower than the 3.1 million thefts reported by Consumer Reports, the report said, though it acknowledged the likelihood that thefts are underreported.
TAC Chairman Dennis Roberson, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said TAC will continue to look at the issue next year. Roberson touched on one of the key recommendations. “It’s obviously the great fear out there that once we implement this, all phones in the United States are suddenly locked and wiped,” he said.