Forbes are reporting that smartphones in California will require a remote kill switch to turn off various aspects of the device. The new law, which isn’t due to come in until July 1st 2015, is designed to provide law enforcement with the ability to disable devices, their cameras, audio recording and other aspects.
It’s easy to see why law enforcement might want this, and indeed why a great number of the public might not. Imagine a riot where the police disable devices for whatever reason, preventing the public from using their devices to take photos of alleged police misconduct. There are very good reasons why this might be needed, and why we might also want this never to come in to force.
You might think that this is only a California issue, but hardware manufacturers are unlikely to produce one device for the Californian market with remote kill switches and another for everyone else without the kill switch. The law states that it must be a ‘technological solution’ which doesn’t rule out a 3rd party app or OS tweak being installed by the phone companies or manufacturers. However it’s very likely that if this takes off in California that phone manufacturers will install this device in all devices.
The governments ability to disable your phone is coming, it may just be a case of when.