The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has confirmed that Apple has already started sharing data to track stolen devices and now locks them remotely once reported lost, while Samsung and Google are rolling out similar security changes. Together, these measures are making it harder for criminals to resell stolen phones, with phone theft offences down 18% in the past year, the result of two years of pressure from the Met. Rowley says that’s expected to help drive crime down further as the trend continues.
However, Kingston Technology, a world leader in memory and storage solutions, has warned that resale value and data exposure are two separate problems, and progress on one does not take away the risks of the other.
“Blocking resale doesn’t undo the moment a phone was taken, and whatever was stored on it is exposed the instant it changes hands, whether the thief was ever after resale value in the first place or not,” says Iwona Zalewska, Regional Director for UK & Ireland, DRAM Business Manager, EMEA Region at Kingston Technology. “That risk exists today and isn’t something the reactivation crackdown was designed to lower.”
Kingston’s IronKey range exists to take that risk off the table before it happens, by giving people somewhere safer than the phone itself to keep their most sensitive files. For everyday phone users, that means personal records and old photos backed up to a drive rather than sitting on a device that could be lost or stolen at any time. For professionals and contractors, it means client files and commercial information staying off the phone entirely.
IronKey drives use FIPS-certified, XTS-AES 256-bit hardware encryption, with built-in protection against BadUSB and brute force password attacks, keeping data physically and cryptographically secured under the user’s own control rather than reliant on a network connection, a manufacturer patch, or a cloud provider’s servers.
While device security catches up, Kingston IronKey offers an answer already on the market today, a way to keep sensitive data off the phone in the first place, so it’s never at risk regardless of what happens to the device.