Tech Companies to New York for Smartphone Theft Summit
Published at(NEW YORK) — Smartphone theft has become so common police have a name for it: Apple Picking. Now prosecutors in New York and in San Francisco want smartphone manufacturers to sour the fruit.
They’ve summoned Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung to a conference next week where they will press for a so-called “kill switch,” to render a stolen smartphone permanently inoperable.
Eliminating the phone’s ability to be reactivated, prosecutors say, would make it useless to criminals who wipe clean stolen phones and resell them on the black market.
Last year, 1.6 million smartphones were stolen.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio