Cell Phone Providers Turn Down Anti-Theft Plan Because Insurance Profits

If you ever thought for 1 second that your cell phone provider actually cared about you as a customer, you can think again. They don’t care if you lose your phone, run over it with your car, drop it down the toilet, or play ultimate frisbee with it. Heck, they don’t even care if your phone gets stolen. Well, let me take that last statement back – they actually do care if it gets stolen because it means you have to get a new phone if you don’t recover the stolen one.

San Francisco’s District Attorney, George Gascón, has recently been working on a plan with Samsung that would allow their devices to be remotely disabled in the case of theft. This “kill switch” sounds like a great idea, but major cell phone providers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile want nothing to do with the anti-theft plan.

Why In The World Would They Reject An Anti-Theft Plan?

Yes, you guessed it: money. Apparently, your cell phone carrier makes a good chunk of change off of the monthly insurance fees you pay them, and they don’t want to risk losing out on any of that precious income because of some anti-theft plan.

Gascón stumbled across some emails between Samsung and software developers that suggested the major cell phone providers care more about insurance premiums than they do about the potential theft of their customer’s devices. Gascón had this to say regarding the emails:

“Corporate profits cannot be allowed to guide decisions that have life-or-death consequences. This solution has the potential to safeguard Samsung customers, but these emails suggest the carriers rejected it so they can continue to make money hand over fist on insurance premiums.”

I was never one to really think that my cell phone provider cared all that much about me as a customer, and a story like this serves to validate my opinion.

What are your thoughts?

[Image via tnt24]

SOURCE: http://gizmodo.com/phone-carriers-reject-anti-theft-plan-so-they-can-sell-1467503893