The major cellphone carriers in the US have agreed a deal with the US government to build a central database of stolen cellphones in the US, and the database will be designed to track any smartphone or cellphone that has been reported as lost of stolen.
The four companies involved in the database include AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, and they idea behind it is that it will make it difficult for stolen or lost mobile phones to be re-sold as they will be tracked via the database.
“New technologies create new risks,” said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which negotiated the database proposal. “We wanted to find a way to reduce the value of stolen smartphones.”
It will be interesting to see if the new database has an impact in cutting down smartphone crime in the US, and the database is expected to be centralized within 12 months with individual carriers rolling out their own databases within 6 months.
Source WSJ
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