Aug. 18, 2015
When it comes to smartphones, we are living in the midst of a criminal epidemic. There were 3.1 million victims of smartphone theft in 2013, nearly double the number in 2012, according to 2014 estimates by Consumer Reports. According to the same report, only one-third of smartphone users bother to require passcodes to access their phones, while another third take no steps at all to secure the data on their phones. In that environment, Apple’s decision to secure our phones for us using default encryption—thereby deterring theft and protecting the data on stolen phones by making them inaccessible to anyone but their users—is not surprising and is indeed deserving of praise rather than condemnation. What is surprising is to hear top law enforcement officials criticizing a technology that could stem the tide of this criminal epidemic that impacts millions of Americans.