Government wants more protection for smartphones

UK NANNY STATE government officials want manufacturers to install better security protection into smartphones in case users, particularly Ministry of Defence officials, happen to lose them.

Alan Campbell, Minister for Crime Prevention, said firms "have a social and a corporate responsibility to tackle crime." We guess he means they should be on the beat collaring kids who nick phones - oh no, that is the job of the police.

Campbell called for phone companies to come up with some natty technology to protect users from having their mobiles pinched. "First this is a great opportunity - this is new technology which can be promoted around the world," Campbell told the BBC. This is probably because this miracle panacea has not been invented yet.

Campbell likened the problem to that of car theft. He said that following government intervention, innovations in the car industry, such as immobilisers, had helped cut theft by 60 per cent in 10 years.

He pointed to figures that suggested 250 phones a minute are reported lost or stolen.

The Home Office unveiled the winning designs in a crime prevention contest, aimed at making mobile phones less attractive to thieves. The winners included an alarm that sounds when a phone is too far from its owner and locks the handset. Another was a system to encrypt the user's data on the phone.

However all the technology in the world is not going to stop you leaving the phone on the train, or dropping it, which is what happens to most users. We suspect this is behind most cases of missing phones rather than a street side mugging or car prowl. µ