Major U.S. Carriers Agree to Develop Centralized Database to Track Stolen Mobile Phones

No one has to be. It's the truth...

Utter nonsense!

Explain how telling your carrier the IMEI (which they already know) of a device you no longer have is going to help them (or the government) track you?

People really have to think before they write.

You'd give the police the licence plate number of your car if it was stolen wouldn't you?

Hasn't the UK had this for years? I think a lot of 'blocked' phones end up getting exported.

this is only good news, only thieves or people complicit in stolen phones would oppose this.

So you have a way for phones to be shut off in mass. Say activists are using mobile devices to get people to show up in one place. Those activists phones are reported stolen by some crazy coincidence. Phones are all deactivated around time of rally, protest or whatever. Kinda like how they do it now, but without needing to shut off towers.

My God, they can do that withouth any new registry.

Really, do you understand what are we talking about or you're only raging about how bads are Feds?

How long until Feds and Local Law are abusing this?

And how can they abuse it?

So at any time they could track a non-stolen phone?

Surprise, they can do that NOW

So what the heck took so long? Unforgivable. And Apple made it worse by guaranteeing to legitimize stolen phones. :mad:

Every step taken towards making a stolen phone less usable makes stealing them less profitable, and so reduces crime. Good news.

Why would you need to do that if you have access to the list or can add numbers to the list without the carriers even knowing? It seems like the system will allow local police to access and amend the list to their liking, and not vice versa with the carriers in charge of who gets shut down.

The database would not allow that to happen. It would require a link back to a carrier, so that the carrier could remove a device from the database if it was recovered and the customer requested that the device be removed from the database.

When a device is reported lost or stolen, it's not always going to be gone forever. It might be that the customer finds it at the back of their sofa an hour after reporting it lost! The system must be flexible enough to deal with that.

Even if the police could access the list, they'd need to know the customer's IMEI - obtaining that would require just as much legal work as going through a legitimate channel to block the customer's device/service. If they did block the device in this manner, the customer could have the block removed in just a few minutes with a single call to their carrier. Other methods of disabling the service would be longer lasting and much simpler to implement.

Because it's a more direct and targeted approach. You still need a court order to shut down towers at the moment.

But you don't need a court order to phone up a customer's carrier, impersonate them and report their phone stolen?

You could do far more effective things if you're prepared to be that illegal.

Why not just phone the carrier and cancel the contract instantly? It would be a lot harder for a customer to reverse that in a short period of time.

So at any time they could track a non-stolen phone?

Yes, but not because of this.

The database will only contain the IMEI of devices that have been reported stolen.

If your phone isn't stolen/lost, then it's not in the database.

That doesn't mean that your carrier can't track you anyway, they pretty much have to do that in order to provide you with service.

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IN THE SAME WAY. OMG YOU CAN DO THAT? YOU CAN ABUSE ONE SYSTEM LIKE YOU ABUSE ANY OTHER SYSTEM? THAT'S POSSIBLE????
God, stop arguing for the sake of arguing. It can be abused under the same premise that current phone registries are abused. IT'S JUST ANOTHER SOURCE FOR ABUSE.

How is it?

You keep ignoring the key point:

The database only contains IMEIs of stolen devices

The device that you have in your pocket right now isn't going to be in the database unless it's stolen.

i.e. they cannot ever track you using this database

I'd be very happy for the authorities to track down whoever stole my phone.

In the event that the phone is recovered, it would be removed from the database by contacting your carrier (if they didn't remove it, then it wouldn't work!).

In that event, your phone is no longer on the database, so you can put your tinfoil hat back in the cupboard.

As has been said repeatedly, the carriers and phone manufacturers already have the IMEIs of the devices people are using for obvious reasons. All that's new here is that someone's creating a database that says "these devices have been reported lost or stolen" - nothing more, nothing less. There's nothing in this database that cannot be found in a more convenient place by the carriers or the government. What do you think is going to happen?

"You had an iPhone 4S stolen last week - off to Guantanamo bay"