Comment Re:Kill switches are probably a bad idea (Score 1) 299
It isn't enough to simply look at the world as is. You must consider the world with universal deployment of kill switches and fully understand likely consequences as much as possible.
Yup. It isn't that bad. The addition of kill switches (to phones that don't already have them) isn't going to contribute significantly to possible oppression.
Stolen phones can be taken apart and sold for parts... Thieves doing this may well end up making more money than phone as a whole can be sold in an underground market.
Which doesn't seem to happen. iPhone thefts dropped after Apple introduced a kill switch. Lots of places have killable phones, and have found that thefts go down. This does appear to be an effective anti-crime measure, and that is good. That's empirical evidence, and I'm giving that a greater weight than your theorizing.
Note that phone thefts tend to be the snatch-and-grab type, not the holdup type. Holdups have a good many more dangers, and making them longer by interrogating the victim for credentials makes them more risky. Also, we don't have to wipe out phone thefts as a practice for such a measure to be good.