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September 10, 2009

Apple and Amazon to users: Shut up and give us the money

Amazon and Apple refuse to "brick" stolen devices in just another symptom of contempt for the customer

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I was walking in Glen Park, a solidly middle-class San Francisco neighborhood, the other day. And there on a telephone pole was a notice from the police warning me not to use my iPhone openly or walk around with the tell-tale white ear buds showing. You can guess the reason. iPhones and ear buds are mugger magnets. Solid, if unsettling, advice I thought. And when I did a little research, I found that police in other cities -- New York, for one -- hand out similar advice.

Yet when queried about cell phone theft by the New York Times, John Walls, a spokesman for the CTIA, the wireless industry's trade group, says that phones are so cheap (because of carrier subsidies) that theft is not a significant problem. What a bunch of nonsense. Police aren't handing out those warning for nothing. So far this year, there have been 120 robberies involving iPhones in San Francisco, a five-fold increase over 2008, Sgt. Wilfred Williams, a spokesman for the SFPD, told me. And sometimes the victim is beaten, not just robbed. Sounds significant to me. As does the $199 to $299 price tag.

[ Find the latest iPhone apps for business and IT with InfoWorld's free service. | Get InfoWorld's 28-page Enterprise iPhone Deep Dive PDF report. | Stay up to date on the latest mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobilize newsletter. ]

Sure, you can call AT&T after a theft and they'll turn off the account. But a smart thief or fence (a middleman in the stolen goods food chain) knows that replacing the SIM card makes that iPhone good to go. Similarly, the rightful owner of a stolen Kindle (Amazon's e-book reader) can turn off the account -- but the device remains usable. So there's incentive to steal them.

[Update: iPhone 3.1, released Wednesday,  apparently allows users of MobileMe to disable the iPhone over the air. Whether changing the SIM card defeats that tactic isn't yet clear. I'm glad Apple made the change, but why did it take so long and why is it only available to users of a $99-a-year service?]

The CTIA's Walls is just doing his job. He doesn't have the power to do anything but issue press releases. But other people in the industry do have power, so why don't companies like Apple and Amazon.com fight crime by making stolen wireless devices useless to the thief? It's not that technically hard, nor that expensive. It's cultural: Give us your money and then shut up.

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Elfish 10-Sep-09 5:26am
I agree with you. I like both Apple and Amazon but the shut up and give us your money is certainly true. Capitalism at its finest.
BigRonG 10-Sep-09 10:19am
It's business today. IMHO every business website should have the telephone number on each page. Pick a business today and the chances are that you cannot find a phone and maybe not even the corporate address! ONCOR the government monopoly electricity delivery company in my area only has a phone for problems. And that's a 'leave a message' line. You'd think a bunch of theives were hijacking businesses and were afraid of consumers. Oh snap!....
dgrizzle 10-Sep-09 10:50am
Why limit this feature to iPhone and Kindle? I lost a laptop - what an ordeal! How I wish I could remote kill that machine and wipe the data. Apple does not keep a list of stolen laptop serial numbers! So the thief / fence / end user can go to the Apple Store for free assistance at the Genius Bar! (BTW - you can't tell me people don't know they are buying stolen goods - no crackhead thief wipes hard drives and reinstalls a clean OS...) And police - what a horror story of indignities. I had clear security video of the theft and 2 eyewitnesses who wrote down the license plate. Houston Harris Co. Deputy: "That car is registered on the other side of town. I'm not driving over there." He adds, "Nobody I know ever paid more than $1,000 for a laptop, but I've never written a theft report under $5,000." Thanks, officer. If it had been a rape, I suppose your attitude would be, "Hey baby, you're pretty hot! Did you like it?" The thieves were pros - they were in and out of my locked Chevy Suburban faster than with a key. (I stopped 15 minutes at 1 retail store the day after Thanksgiving.) My loss: Apple MacBook Pro 17" with every option. 5 hardware dongle keys valued at more than $8,000. Plus an external HD filled with a major year-long project. I'm an IT guy; I had backups. But it was still an incredible ordeal to rebuild my life considering a multitude of software authentications, password recovery, etc. Two years later, I'm still hurting. Sounds bad, but actually worse - I won't go into insurance and dongle key license losses. I have a short list of heros and a long list of zeros after this experience.
agedwirehead 10-Sep-09 11:43am
At least Apple has been this way from day one. One is either part of the program or completely unwanted. In '81 a high exec with the company told me, "We have a policy here. You are either having fun or you have no business being here." That was said concerning associates, but it has always seemed that way for customers, too. Don't get me wrong, I am very fond of my AIR and iMAC, and I love working on an Xserve, although there is precious little to do. My point is that, regardless of the supplier, customers need to practice being aware before they buy. With Apple or Amazon, I spend time understanding who they think the target market for a product is, and how they intend folks to use the product. The result is that I have a lot less GURD. Apple and Amazon have both come through to solve problems that directly relate to the sales transaction. When the problem was that the product was less than I thought it was going to be, both companies were slow to respond. When the issue was a very helpful service they could provide in conjunction with their product--forget about it. When I think about it from their perspective, I can see why they wouldn't rush to provide the services you are suggesting. 1) They could get into lots of trouble arbitrating who is the legitimate owner of a product. 2) Someone could sue them for disabling a product. 3) etc.
dmarois 10-Sep-09 4:29pm
"We're spending good money to buy these products. We're owed respect and decent customer service. It's time to start punishing vendors who treat customers with contempt. Make sure your complaints are loud and make sure other consumers (and tech writers) hear them." LOL! Yeah, like that's going to happen anytime soon. You people are addicts. You look more than old enough to remember the coffee crisis in the seventies. Did you stop drinking coffee? As long as you believe you NEED this crap you'll keep getting screwed. And you'll continue deserving it.
Bill Snyder 10-Sep-09 9:43pm
I do plead guilty to being something of a tech addict. However, consider Dell computer. Back when I worked at PCWorld in the late 90s, Dell's stuff always scored great on service and reliability surveys we ran and I was always comfortable recommending Dell as a buy. When Dell's service went off the cliff, I (and plenty of other writers) made it known, consumers got mad and you know, Dell really suffered as buyers decided to beware. I think that anger contributed to some positive changes at the company. You're too cynical dmarois
rdm 11-Sep-09 5:01am
If the companies could disable devices, I expect this would become a PR nightmare for them, and quite possible a liability nightmare -- in part because the consequences of this kind of design would be rather extensive with both obvious and non-obvious implications. [] For starters, think about what this would mean in the context of unlocking iphones. [] Meanwhile, I am not very confident that you can make a device immune to the effects of physically modifying it.
gnwiii 11-Sep-09 7:51am
Without expensive verification it would be possible for some enemy to brick all your devices, so the approach only makes sense for devices costing over $1000, and even then there are risks that some scr**up will brick a device when it is most inconvenient (say, at the start of your 6-month residency on the moon).
digitalMnAguy 11-Sep-09 9:17am
I wonder if there is a legal argument where selling data service to a device that a company knows has been stolen makes them legally complicit in the theft (like standing lookout for a criminal's hideout, rather than the scene of the crime) or liable for obstruction of justice. I doubt that the law has caught up with this paradigm yet, but if there's any teeth to this approach, all of these vendors would face hefty DOJ settlements.
zornwil 14-Sep-09 6:43am
I think the risk of accidental, hacked, or questionable corporate-driven activation of bricking is enough to make it a non-starter for most devices, along the lines of gnwiii's comment that perhaps devices over $1K is where this sort of technology would make more sense. Additionally, there's an increased cost to the devices to be factored in coupled with the likelihood it will create more issues than it resolves given the increased complexity and entirely new avenue of support which, if offered, better be darn good - and is any of that worth it to me as a customer? No. Personally, I would rather see it as an optional add-on for storage devices, though I recognize that has a number of complications. Anyway, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this ultimately-corporate-controlled bricking on most of my devices from a pure risk perspective, and, yes, I'm quite willing to risk a thief getting what's on there. Where I would not be so willing to take that risk would be something like my laptop (which of course comes with virtually no remote-bricking capability and only BIOS-level password and such protection). A PDA is something I "know" will be lost someday, not that it's happened to me yet, but I presume it will happen someday given the ever-shrinking size and ease of dropping it down a gap somewhere in addition to forgetfulness or not noticing where it is.
Neil McAllister 29-Sep-09 2:10pm
Hi Bill, worth noting that talking on your cell phone or wearing white earbuds while walking around also means you aren't paying attention to your surroundings. I live in Glen Park and this neighborhood has seen a rash of armed muggings, at least one murder, and a horrific armed robbery that put a local business owner in the hospital in danger of his life. The muggers aren't just stealing iPods -- their tactic is to catch you off guard, threaten you with a weapon, and demand your money, your credit cards, AND all your ID. So always be aware of your surroundings and anyone who might be in the immediate area -- word to the wise for anyone who walks alone in a major city, even in a "solidly middle-class" neighborhood like this one.

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