DA to Apple: Make iPhone's Activation Lock the rule
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón released survey results Wednesday that he says makes an argument for Apple to enable its Activation Lock security feature on every phone. — When enabled, Activation Lock …
Context & Ripple Effects
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón has been pressing Apple on phone theft since at least April 2013, when he met directly with the company over street thefts of iPhones. Wednesday's survey release escalates that campaign from a private meeting to a public argument: Gascón wants Activation Lock switched on by default on every iPhone rather than left to the owner to enable.
The story traveled unusually widely for a local official's press conference — pickups ranged from HuffPost (which tied it to a state legislator preparing a 'kill switch' mandate bill) to NEWS.com.au, SiliconBeat, and the major Apple-focused blogs — signaling that prosecutors see default-on security settings as the next lever against smartphone theft. It also sits awkwardly beside the encryption fight: the same year, Apple was deluged by police demands to decrypt seized iPhones, so law enforcement is simultaneously pushing Apple to lock phones harder and unlock them on demand.
First-order effects
- Apple now faces a named, public demand from a prominent prosecutor to flip Activation Lock from opt-in to default on every iPhone, putting the company's default-settings choices under political scrutiny.
- iPhone owners who leave Activation Lock disabled are the immediate beneficiaries if Apple complies — a stolen phone becomes far less valuable to resellers the moment the feature ships enabled.
Second-order effects
- Gascón's survey hands ammunition to California legislators drafting a mandatory 'kill switch' bill, meaning Apple could face a legal requirement rather than a request if it does not act voluntarily.
- Rival handset makers selling into the Bay Area market get pulled into the same campaign — if default-on anti-theft locking becomes the prosecutorial benchmark, Android vendors' theft-deterrence defaults become a comparison point rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anti-theft features shift from consumer choice to mandated baseline, with prosecutors and state legislatures — not manufacturers' product teams — setting device-security defaults.
- Default-on locks deepen the structural tension between two law-enforcement goals: making phones worthless to thieves while still being able to extract evidence from seized devices, a tension already visible in the decryption demands of 2013.
The trend: Smartphone security is moving from user-configured options toward prosecutor- and regulator-driven defaults, with district attorneys using surveys and proposed legislation to force anti-theft features on by default.