Unfortunly I have recently lost one of my beloved gadgets, and after that situation I came up with this idea. I presents you an anti-thef system. I don't have the technical skills to develop it, neither I have the time, that's why I decided to post it here and if you consider this idea viable, may some of you want to involve in this tiny project with me
The idea:
Motivations: Most people don’t think about recovering their gadgets until they lose them. There are plenty of applications in Google Play dedicated to this purpose, however they are useless in most of the circumstances, specially if we attend to the fact that except in some exceptions, these apps don’t survive a factory reset
Idea: I propose to develop a system with wide acceptance among developers which in a transparent way for users allows them to gather information if their gadgets have been lost. This system would activate after downloading an application using this technology. This application would gather information about the gadget (permanent data such serial number of IMEI and volatile data such email address or phone number) and send it to a database usable only by the gadget's owner
Design: The system would have two parts:
The idea:
Motivations: Most people don’t think about recovering their gadgets until they lose them. There are plenty of applications in Google Play dedicated to this purpose, however they are useless in most of the circumstances, specially if we attend to the fact that except in some exceptions, these apps don’t survive a factory reset
Idea: I propose to develop a system with wide acceptance among developers which in a transparent way for users allows them to gather information if their gadgets have been lost. This system would activate after downloading an application using this technology. This application would gather information about the gadget (permanent data such serial number of IMEI and volatile data such email address or phone number) and send it to a database usable only by the gadget's owner
Design: The system would have two parts:
- An API - This API must be extremely simple and it could be integrated in all the applications in Google Play without efforts. The more wide accepted it is, the more effective the system will be. That’s why in my opinion this should be developed by a community like this in order to achieve a great acceptance quickly
The code will run the first time the application is executed. In that moment it gathers all the required information and it is sent to the database
- A Web Service - The web service basically is a data base with two user interfaces - One interface designed to receive the data sent by the application - and another interface designed to return the information of a given gadget identified by its serial number. I have been wondering how to verified the ownership of an user, and I there are several ways, however it's an open discussion subject
Advantages of the system:
It’s totally transparent for the user
It’s a reset-proofing system, because as soon as the “new user” downloads a “marked” application, the database will receive helpful information in order to get the gadget returned to the real owner
It has more chances than the traditional applications to have the “thief” triggering events which runs the code
With a minimum cost we can offer something new to the market
Let’s see an example
A nice guy with a new gadget (let’s say a new phone), he downloads some applications, most of them marked with this system. In this situation the database collect the information of this new phone and indexes it using its serial number.
Few days later this nice guy forget his phone in a plane and the person who finds it forces a factory reset. As soon as the phone downloads one application the database stores the new information. Five minutes later our nice guy connects to the web site and discovers the name and the phone number of the person using his phone. They get in touch and the phone is returned to our nice guy
