OXFORD, United Kingdom—The U.K. government is calling on cell-phone operators and terminal manufacturers to rapidly improve the security features of handsets to halt a steep increase in street crime involving cell-phone theft. The Home Office released figures that showed more than 700,000 phones were stolen last year, and in London alone, mobile-phone thefts accounted for more than half of all street muggings.
The government has accused Vodafone and mm02 as the two operators that have failed to adopt any new measures, such as asking their users to record the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number assigned to each handset. “We are focusing on the IMEI, which is a number that is already programmed into every phone,” a government spokesman said. “Three of the U.K. networks, Virgin, One to One and Orange, can already immobilize a phone if they are given the number, effectively making it useless.”
A Vodafone spokeswoman replied to this criticism by claiming the company had not adopted IMEI technology because it is unreliable and could lead to innocent phone users being disconnected. An mm02 official commented: “IMEI barring does not solve the problem because you can reprogram new IMEIs. Also IMEI barring does not disable the handset from being usable. All it does is stop calls being made on the network that barred it. The handset itself is completely usable and does not lose its functionality.”
The handset industry claims that when 3G cell phones become available later this year, new features under development including voice recognition, iris-scanning and personalized subscriber identity module (SIM) cards should greatly improve security. Also smart card developer Gemplus is said to be working on a sensor that recognizes and stores a user’s fingerprint on the SIM card. The phone would only work when the user’s fingerprint matches the one stored within the phone.
