Editorial: Smart idea to fight phone theft

At last, the bell tolls for smartphone thieves.

In a welcome bit of government-industry cooperation, leading cellphone providers will work with the Federal Communications Commission to develop a system that will render stolen smartphones pretty close to useless.

The hope is that this will cut down on the fast-growing crime of smartphone theft that's happening everywhere. In New York City, more than 40 percent of robberies involve phones. Half of U.S. mobile subscribers have smartphones, Nielsen reports, and that proportion is growing fast. In the first quarter of this year, two-thirds of Americans buying a new phone chose a smart one.

The new program announced by the industry consortium and the FCC will establish a database within six months that will allow anyone who reports a lost smartphone to prevent it from being used or activated on the network of their own carrier. Within another year, the industry says, such phones won't be usable on any other carrier.

Despite pleas from Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and others, American carriers have lagged their European counterparts on this front. But the delay isn't just foot-dragging; Americans use two major cellphone technologies, instead of the single standard that is used in most other places. This mixed environment complicates the creation of a systemwide database.

The industry has also pledged to launch a consumer education campaign telling users how to lock their devices with a passcode, for example, and use apps that can locate and remotely lock or erase a lost or stolen smartphone.

The advent of a centralized database that will render a stolen smartphone difficult to reuse is a boon to users, and based on the experience of such databases in other countries, should be a deterrent to theft. In the interim, everyone with a smartphone should use the tools available now to guard their devices.

Now that the FCC and the industry are moving aggressively to combat the acute problem of smartphone theft, maybe they can do more to tackle the chronic problem of spam text messages. These aren't as costly as phone thefts, but they do nick users who lack all-you-can-eat texting plans. They are also maddening, arriving at all hours.

And their numbers are growing. Last year U.S. cellphone users got 4.5 billion spam texts, a figure that more than doubled in just two years. That's roughly 18 for every cellphone in the country that can receive such a message. Some of these texts are "phishing" for user information that can be sold or otherwise exploited. Others hope to enmesh users in costly come-ons that are hard to cancel. When a user responds to a spam text with NO or STOP, often it merely enables the spammer to sell the number as one confirmed to be working.

Mobile spam is against federal law, and the industry recently rolled out a system that lets cellphone users forward such texts to 7726 (which spells SPAM on most keypads) and have the sending number blocked. Of course, these nuisance texters change numbers often and use other techniques to get around filters.

No cellphone user is an island, which is the point of these devices. The challenge is finding some reliable way to vote the spammers off.