I would rather my devices become bricked if they're stolen from me. You are welcome to disable the feature on your own devices or not purchase devices that have this feature.
You can remotely brick it. The minute that the thief tries to do anything with the device, it's functionally useless. It needs to be online to be reactived, and if the device is marked stolen, it won't activate.
The thing is that almost none of what I'm talking about are marked as stolen. They're just old devices bricked because they weren't removed from an account.
allowing this would open the possibility of thefts forcing the victims to respond in a specific way thus opening a possibility of violence along with theft.
so no to that. the solution to work as deterrent should be final: stolen device = brick device, no other possibility.
in the case of solving theft of devices we have to choose the price we want to pay. all solutions are based on various ways to deter the theft. there is no solution to stop the action of theft once started. thus all solutions have a price that could range from false positives (like legit owners being locked out) to waste like theft happens because they dont know that they cannot unlock it without destroying the device.
Trying to prevent theft that way is a fundamentally flawed approach. It's in the end all about controlling the phone you brought to prevent you from using it in any way they don't like or using it longer then they like (by repairing it).
Theft will happen anyway. You can even sell permanently-locked/bricked devices to people which doesn't look to closely at the sellers description. Sure you will need to sell them for cheap, but that's all.
That idea is like saying all cars must be always tracked, always link up with the drivers phone and be remote-controllable by there manufacturer to prevent theft.
Sure it would prevent theft, maybe, until people find ways to brake it. But it's still totally unreasonable with a lot of hidden cost to it.
E.g. in case of apple laptops the cost is losing a lot of small independent companies as well as any way to properly repair an Apple laptop. (Apple doe NOT provide proper repairs they at best replace whole components often the whole main board because it's one component when many damages tend to be similar because people use their devices similar and often are reasonable fixable with a bit of not-easy-but-not-very-hard-either soldering).
EDIT: And most important! The theft constraint can be archived to a reasonable degree WITHOUT locking out third party repair. A example (through not applicable to mac in this case) is how I setup my laptop with a custom EFI platform key/certificate and a BIOS password so to reuse it after theft people have to replace the BIOS chip soldered onto the motherboard (it has no publicly known master key or reset pin). Apple can archive similar things so that theft is more costy but third party repairs are still mostly unconstrained.
Because there's an epidemic of cell phone theft, many cellphone manufacturers don't provide a reliable mechanism for the victim of theft to deactivate their phone, and third party solutions are hit-and-miss. The primary purpose of the legislation is to require manufacturers to provide users with a way to remotely brick their phone. They're also required to get the user's permission for this as part of the phone setup, and make it easy for the user to disable the feature at any time. That's why there is support for this ability in a phone.
I have absolutely no problem doing whatever I like to hardware that is stolen from me. However, mere spying doesn't get the message across.
I'd prefer to brick the unit. A nice fast erasure of the firmware would be good, though reflashing the unit to display an "I'm stolen" message would be better. You could even request payment for an unlock ("This is stolen, but you can buy it from me.")
Well, one could solve that just as well with a device that is fully open to the owner and still pointless to steal. By handing out a per-device master reset key that the owner doesn't need for regular operation and thus doesn't have with the device when and where someone might want to steal it.
It also presumably further discourages theft since it negatively impacts the ability to “part out” stolen devices to work around activation locks. Basically once the owner remotely locks the stolen device, it becomes almost worthless until it’s back in the owner’s possession.
I've always assumed bricking legislation has nothing to do with theft and everything to do with shutting down communications during civil unrest to prevent even adhoc wireless networks by completely bricking the device. The proponents of a similar bill in my country are all intel agency shills that normally never dabble in any laws regarding street crime yet are heavily lobbying for this. The ability of the owner to opt-out or perform this remote brick themselves was also rejected with the police having sole power over the keys.
This makes the unwary buyer a victim of the thief as well. All the more reason to brick stolen devices and make them unsellable by the thief so they can't victimize more people.
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