Have Many New Products Are Becoming Unstealable?
As life becomes much harder for thieves, will we ever reach the point where things become unstealable?.
When Joshua Kaufman had his Mac stolen he knew exactly where it was and who had it. The anti theft app he had downloaded meant that he could remotely photograph the guy using it and even find its exact location. The guy was a taxi driver and had his face splashed across the world because of Joshuas blog 'This guy has my Macbook'. Still on there you can see pictures of him sleeping on the sofa, driving and lying in bed.
Kaufman used the Hidden app which tracks the location of laptops as well as sending photos to the owner, but there are many basic GPS tracking apps available now that present a formidable barrier to thieves. Find my iPhone is one of the best publicized apps, but there are many others and also ones for Android smartphones as well. This sort of technology doesn't necessarily make something impossible to steal, but it certainly makes it much more difficult to use and sell on.
According to the British Retail Consortium, last year saw the lowest level of thefts per 100 stores over the last seven years with thefts falling to 2,833 per 100 stores down from 3,490 the previous year. This is mainly due to the increasing use of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tracking devices, which are being attached to an increasing range of different products, even sometimes as mundane as meat and cheese (apparently they are items often targeted by thieves).
As our homes become more and more connected up to the internet world we live in, we will not only be able to remotely control appliances, like air conditioning or central heating, but more desirable items like Flat screen TV's could easily have a GPS system installed in them, enabling the identification and recovery of stolen items much easier, and the possibility of selling them for cash much diminished.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati