Editing 1934: Phone Security

These may be options that would appear on the [[:Category:xkcd Phones|XKCD Phone]], but that is not mentioned specifically, and this comic does not appear to be directly linked.

The first two options: Set '''Passcode to Unlock''', and '''Erase phone after 10 failed unlock attempts''' are both real security measures found on most phones.

The additional options:

If phone is stolen it may be: 

* '''Tracked''': That would allow the police to catch the perpetrator and return your phone. This function is available on most modern phones.

* '''Erased''': That would prevent any sensitive data from being taken by a thief. This is also available on most modern phones.

* '''Detonated''': That would likely harm the thief, possibly severely depending on how the phone was detonated. The main problem with this approach (ignoring the possibility of manslaughter), is that if the phone is capable of detonation it's possible that, by accident or glitch or a malicious hacker, the phone could detonate when not stolen, possibly hurting or killing the rightful owner. Many phone batteries will produce an explosion if their temperature rises high enough, and contain circuitry both inside the battery and inside the logic of the phone to prevent this.

'''If the phone is stolen, play an earsplitting siren until the battery dies or is removed''': This would be to draw attention to the thief, and discourage them from stealing future phones.

'''If the phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background...''' :This series of options is all humorous, indicating that the phone would allow the thief to think that it had factory reset, but the phone would, in fact, not do so, and would instead foil the thief by doing various horrible things to them.

* '''Constantly Request Dozens of Simultaneous Rideshares to the Phone's Location''': This would cause tons of "rides" to show up at the stolen phone, leaving a lot of annoyed ridesharers, and possibly alerting the police to the thief's location. The thief may begin developing serious paranoia.

* '''Automatically order food to the Phone's location from every delivery place within 20 miles''': This would be similar to the ridesharing issue, except it would be implied that the thief would be on the hook to pay for all of that delivered food. This could also lead the police to the thief.

* '''If the thief logs into Facebook, send hostile messages to all their family members''': This has now deviated from things that could even possibly be useful, and is now just getting revenge on the thief, or potentially the person that the thief sells the phone to.

* '''Automatically direct self driving car to drive toward the phone's location at 5mph''': This would cause a self driving car to slowly follow the thief. This could absolutely catch the thief, but would also just be really, really creepy. This is similar to the plot of the movie "{{w|It Follows}}".

* '''Take photos of random objects at the thief's address and post them as "Free" on Craigslist or NextDoor''': Craigslist and NextDoor are sites that allow people to post advertisements for various things. Posting a large number of things for free would cause a lot of people to show up at the thief's residence, which can be found via GPS, requesting the free things, or, more humorously, if the thief was not home, people may just come by and take things, causing them to steal from the thief. This would be a humorous form of poetic justice.

The title text extends the last category with: Wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a new phone. This would be the ultimate in poetic justice, as it would basically say that the user does not care if their phone gets stolen, because the thief will end up unintentionally buying them a new one. If the thief were to complain about this, they would have to admit that they had stolen the first phone in order to do so, which they would be disinclined to do.

Note that all of these security measures, except for the remote detonation, could theoretically be done by a security app on a typical smartphone, although the fake factory reset and most (if not all) of what follows would likely require a phone to be rooted and have a custom operating system installed. With the advent of open source phones such as the Librem 5, tricks such as these have become much easier for the average programmer to implement, and some may already exist in the wild.

:* Passcode to unlock <span style="color:blue">(Set Code)</span>