California kill switch law seen going national
Source: Rex Crum
By signing in to a law a bill that requires anti-theft kill switches on smartphones, California Gov. Jerry Brown has set what will likely be a nationwide standard for wireless devices shipped across the nation.
The law, which Brown signed Monday, takes effect in July 2015. It requires smartphones sold in the state to come with a built-in technology that allows a person to remotely erase the information from their phone or render it unusable if their phone is stolen. That ruins the phone’s resale value, which is the main reason smartphones get swiped.
A key feature of the California law requires manufacturers to ship their products to the state with the kill-switch technology automatically activated.
Because California, with its 38 million residents, is the nations biggest cellphone market and a major hub of the tech industry, the new rule is expected to set a precedent that will roll across the country.
“Given the nation is moving in the same direction, and the feature is executed in software, the cost is relatively trivial when spread across all the phones, so I would expect this feature to be universal shortly,” said Rob Enderle, president of tech research company The Enderle Group.
The impetus behind efforts to add such technologies to mobile phones is to cut down on smartphone thefts, which nearly doubled across the country between 2012 and 2013.
Many smartphone makers, including Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.05% Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.37% and Blackberry Inc. BBRY, +0.60% , already have kill-switch capabilities built into their products. But most of them leave it as an option that users have to turn on themselves.
The CTIA trade group, which represents the wireless communications industry, came out against the California law, citing its opposition to measures that are specific to individual states.
“We think that manufacturers would be irritated by the fact that California is requiring it,” said Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray. “But [they] ultimately will comply with the feature in all phones worldwide because as the phone becomes a greater and more important part of our lives, including the [digital] wallet, the need for a kill switch is going to become increasingly important.”
Muster said that since Apple already includes a kill switch option on its iPhone, between 70% and 80% of the current smartphone market would carry kill switches if cellphone makers using Google’s GOOGL, +0.12% Android platform also made such technology standard on their own devices.
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