Apple tells Met to embrace ‘traditional policing' in clash over phone thefts
Gary Davis, a senior executive at the iPhone-maker, said police were not fully investigating some phone thefts in Britain by seeking information about the stolen devices from Apple.
In a hearing before MPs on the science, innovation and technology committee, Mr Davis was asked whether Apple should be doing more to build a technical solution to phone thefts.
He replied: 'I would want to make sure that as part of all of that the Met Police continues to do traditional policing, which means sending requests to us for stolen devices and Apple responding to those requests for stolen devices. We are not seeing that.'
It came after senior police officials urged tech companies to consider new technical ways of preventing theft.
The Met wants mobile phone makers to use a unique number linked to a phone's modem chip – which connects to mobile networks – to identify phones that are reported stolen and block them.
Police believe up to three quarters of stolen phones are moved abroad, with 28pc ending up in China or Hong Kong and many in Algeria. The Met recorded more than 80,000 phone thefts in 2024, up by a quarter on 2023 levels.
Once overseas, these phones become more difficult to track. While UK networks can implement some blocking on the 'IMEI' chip numbers of stolen phones, this is more patchy internationally.
Speaking on Tuesday, Darren Scates, the Met's chief digital officer, said one proposal that was being 'considered by Apple and Google' was to 'stop a smart phone serial number being allowed to connect to their services if it is reported as lost or stolen'. The police say this would make the device worthless.
Mr Scates added that technology companies had provided methods to 'lock the device' remotely, but some criminals had means of cracking this.
Technology chiefs have raised concerns over the risks of allowing more remote locking tools.
Mr Davis said the industry was wary about whether such a system could become a 'vector for fraud', with people potentially being able to make false claims that phones have been stolen, leading to devices being automatically blocked.
The hearing comes amid growing scrutiny over spiralling crime rates across the UK.
The Met has warned that there are growing links between knife crime, child exploitation gangs, drugs and mobile phone theft, with some gangs 'pivoting' from selling illegal drugs to stealing handsets.
Speaking to executives from Apple, Google and Samsung, Kit Malthouse, the senior Conservative MP, suggested that technology companies have been 'dragging their feet' on coming up with a technical solution.
However, Mr Davis said attention also needed to be focussed on the police response to mobile phone theft, saying: 'We need the requests to come to us. We need to give them the responses.
'They need to use the information we provide to them in order to identify where the phones are being stolen, and I assume therefore target resources. I am not just seeing those resources coming through to us.'
Apple said it had introduced a new Stolen Device Protection feature, which requires a Face ID check to access certain phone features, rather than just a code. It has also added technology that can remotely prevent stolen phone parts being stripped and re-used.
Google, meanwhile, has added an artificial intelligence feature to its Android software that can detect if a phone has been snatched.
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