As per media reports, manufacturers will be taking the precautionary step to ensure that the smartphone owners’ data does not fall in the wrong hands with the help of an anti-theft tool. This method will come into reality starting from July 2015 and it is none other than a smartphone kill switch. Well, on Tuesday, CTIA trade group announced ‘Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment’ program that is a baseline anti-theft tool. This tool will either be pre-loaded in the smartphones or users can download them on their handsets that are made by the involved manufacturers or those that are provided by the carriers. This new kill switch meant for the smartphones will remote wipe the user’s data, that is it will delete the personal information such as contacts, emails, photos and the rest soon as the handset is lost or stolen, claims the official page that elaborates more aspects of the new feature. Apart from erasing the personal data, it will also render the handset inoperable for the unauthorized user, for instance it might lock the phone until a PIN or password is keyed in. For now, many manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Google, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft have partnered to include this smartphone kill switch in the their future offerings that will come after July 2015. It has to be noted that this new feature is meant only for the US based smartphones for now and we need to wait to see if it will be made available to other regions as well in future.
