Both iPhone and Android devices have protections against theft.
On an iPhone you can use “Find My iPhone” to locate your device, providing you have turned it on before it was lost or stolen. You can then login to iCloud on a computer and track your phone. If it has been stolen, you can secure it and erase all your data.
Meanwhile Android has “Find My Device” which operates similarly, allowing you to lock your phone and erase your data remotely. Samsung users have a similar tool called “SmartThings Find”.
In these lost modes, Android and iPhone devices cannot be easily unlocked and used again, but thieves are always looking for new ways to bypass these protections.
Android 10 users worldwide will soon receive a feature called Theft Detection Lock, which will use Google’s AI to figure out if your phone has been stolen – and lock the device down.
It does this by recognising how a phone moves and shakes if it’s been snatched out of somebody’s hand and speedily taken away.
Such a device can still be unlocked if someone knows the phone’s PIN or password, while if it triggers by accident it can be unlocked by fingerprint or face scan as normal.
Google is also rolling out an upgrade to how a phone is reset to factory settings, to make it so a device can only be set up again by using the device’s password.
The government wants phone companies to make sure that stolen devices cannot be resold on the second-hand market.
Network operators blacklist the IMEI of devices which are reported stolen, meaning they generally speaking cannot be resold in the UK.
Because of this, thieves will often send stolen devices overseas to be resold in other countries where the IMEI has not been blocked.
Stopping this would require some kind of truly permanent lock to make a device completely unusable for good after it’s reported stolen – presumably involving phone companies making it so a device cannot even be turned on once it’s reported stolen.
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ced1pjd3n3xo
