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Why Tens of Thousands of Perfectly Good, Donated iPhones Are Shredded Every Year (vice.com) 132

Posted by BeauHD from the right-to-repair dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Tens of thousands of perfectly usable iPhones are scrapped each year by electronics recyclers because of the iPhone's "activation lock," according to a new analysis paper published Thursday. Earlier this year, we published a lengthy feature about the iPhone's activation lock (also called iCloud lock informally), an anti-theft feature that prevents new accounts from logging into iOS without the original user's iCloud password. This means that stolen phones can't be used by the person who stole it without the original owner's iCloud password (this lock can also be remotely enabled using Find My iPhone.) The feature makes the iPhone a less valuable theft target, but it has had unintended consequences, as well. iCloud lock has led to the proliferation of an underground community of hackers who use phishing and other techniques to steal iCloud passwords from the original owner and unlock phones. It's also impacted the iPhone repair, refurbishing, and recycling industry, because phones that are legitimately obtained often still have iCloud enabled, making that phone useless except for parts.

Between 2015 and 2018, the Wireless Alliance, the recycling company in question, collected roughly 6 million cell phones in donation boxes it set up around the country. Of those, 333,519 of them were iPhones deemed by the company to be "reusable." And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked and had to be stripped for parts and scrap metal. Last year, a quarter of all reusable iPhones it collected were activation locked. Allison Conwell, a coauthor of the CoPIRG report, told me in a phone call that the Wireless Alliance's findings show that many people donate their devices intending for them to be reused, but they're scrapped instead. In her paper, Conwell suggests that Apple should work with certified recyclers to unlock phones that have been legitimately donated (a survey of random devices conducted by the Wireless Alliance found that more than 90 percent of them had not been reported lost or stolen.) The paper suggests that Apple could either unlock phones that have not been reported lost or stolen for 30 days, or affirmatively ask users whether they had donated their previous phone and unlock it that way.
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Why Tens of Thousands of Perfectly Good, Donated iPhones Are Shredded Every Year More

Why Tens of Thousands of Perfectly Good, Donated iPhones Are Shredded Every Year

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  • The author is delusional (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Apple has zero interest in recycling or repairing recovering data from any of their products, they only want to sell you a new device.

    • Re: The author is delusional (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If and it's a really big if Apple has no interest then why refurbish any phones at all instead of shredding them?

      • Because it's free money for Apple. The phone is bought the first time, so manufacturing cost is covered, plus a bug premium. Then the phone is turned in for an upgrade, refurbished at minimal cost, and resold for not much less than a new device. Free money.

    • This. This consequence is far from "unintended".

    • Most companies have a Love Hate relationship with Refurbished equipment. They hate it because people are buying their products that they have already sold so they are not getting money from it. However they also love it because people are not buying the competing product.

      Apple is in a stronger position if those who cannot afford new Apple products but get refurbished means still more people using the Apple Ecosystem so they still may buy a cheap app or songs that is money in their pocket.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vakuona ( 788200 )

      Apple sells about 200 million iPhones each year. Apple is definitely not attempting to stop tens of thousands of iPhones from being reused to encourage more sales. If anything, iPhones tend to be used longer than other smartphones - https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]

      So this idea that Apple just wants you to get a new one is not supported by the facts.

  • Samsung phones have a similar feature (Score:4, Informative)

    by bferrell ( 253291 ) on Friday April 12, 2019 @10:52PM (#58430066) Homepage Journal

    Do a factory reset and you have to log into the original owners samsung account

    • Re:Samsung phones have a similar feature (Score:5, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday April 13, 2019 @06:49AM (#58430892) Journal

      Do a factory reset and you have to log into the original owners samsung account

      Not just Samsung... all Android phones. Though usually it's your Google account, not your Samsung account, that you need to authenticate to prove ownership after a factory reset. (In fact, even Samsung says it's your Google account [samsung.com]; so I think maybe you're confused about that.)

      This feature, called Factory Reset Protection [androidcentral.com] (FRP) by the Android team, was implemented in both iOS and Android 4-5 years ago,, to comply with a California state law that mandated it. For Android, it was launched in May 2016, in Android 5.1. Although it is only legally required for devices sold in California (AFAIK), it's generally a very good idea. Device theft was rapidly ballooning into a huge problem, but thanks to FRP has ceased to be a significant issue. If you set a password on your phone, thieves get no value from it.

      However, there's no reason that FRP-locked devices have to be destroyed. At least in the Android world, device makers install keys on the devices which can be used to bypass FRP. These keys are only accessible to authorized refurbishing centers, of course, because if they leak to phone thieves then the purpose of the feature is defeated.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You mean when...

  • They have to deny it. Otherwise the government can order them to do it any time they want.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ReneR ( 1057034 )
      they would not need to unlock or de-crypt it, Simply hard resetting would be enough.
    • Apple can disassociate a device from the iCloud account that it's tied to at any time. That means you can factory wipe the device and use the hardware as if it was out of the box new again.

      They won't unless you have an original receipt of purchase, and the device hasn't been put into lost mode.

      That doesn't mean they will grant access to the account that is signed in, it just means the device will be erased and an entirely new account can be signed in.
  • somebody threw out a perfectly good white boy [youtube.com]

  • Maths (Score:3)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @01:23AM (#58430340)

    333,519 of them were iPhones deemed by the company to be "reusable." And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked... the Wireless Alliance found that more than 90 percent of them had not been reported lost or stolen

    Working as intended?

  • That's just 3 cubic meters of waste (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GlobalEcho ( 26240 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @03:52AM (#58430592)

    The number of iPhones discarded due to this problem, 33,000, works out to 3.1 cubic meters of waste (assuming they are all modern size).

    There may be a fair bit of value there, with exotic elements and whatnot, but it's hardly an environmental disaster. It's way less waste volume than you would get from, say, demolishing a Blockbuster Video store and replacing it with a Mattress Firm.

    • And of those, 33,000 of them were iCloud locked and had to be stripped for parts and scrap metal.

      Less, even, if they can reclaim the parts and reuse them for repairs.

    • Are you considering the resources it takes to replace that working appliance? Some estimates place one smartphone to consume an average of 1 gigajoule of energy and 13 tons of water to manufacture.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]

      https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]

      • Are you considering the resources it takes to replace that working appliance? Some estimates place one smartphone to consume an average of 1 gigajoule of energy and 13 tons of water to manufacture.

        I was not considering that. For reference, 33 terajoules is equivalent to 6 or 7 international airline flights and 430000 tons of water is one day of water usage by the US Steel plants in Detroit.

  • Eating into Apple Profits (Score:4, Insightful)

    by X!0mbarg ( 470366 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @05:21AM (#58430736)

    Apple WANTS people to scrap their old iPhones, because they want to sell New phones to everyone.
    It's been the driving force behind their No Repair policy, and why they are so Adamant on blocking any Right to Repair legislation that gets attempted.
    As their new phone sales have been flagging, they are getting desperate to have old phones cycled out so that their new phones get sold.
    -
    Most of the recycling problem would be solved by people disabling their iCloud service before donating. That, or "Factory Rest" them beforehand, as suggested in many other posts.
    -
    How about a campaign geared toward recycling phones?
    "How To Reset" info on a collection website, perhaps?
    That could make a difference as well.

    • Apple WANTS people to scrap their old iPhones, because they want to sell New phones to everyone.

      My wife's experience: The camera on her 2 1/2 year old iPhone stopped working. She made an appointment with the Apple Store, someone took her phone, cleaned up everything, somehow fixed the camera problem, it looks and feels like brand new, and it was free of any charge. Without having to pay for any extended warranty.

      Guess what: The will sell a new iPhone to her in a few years time.

    • "they want to sell New phones to everyone"

      This is not a revelation, since any seller would like to sell new phones to everyone. There is no evidence that Apple is trying to force this more so than anyone else, and they obviously recognize that they cannot magically convert every sale of a used iPhone into a sale of a new iPhone since they themselves sell used iPhones. A healthy market in used goods support higher first sale prices.

      "Most of the recycling problem would be solved by people disabling their iClo

  • I'd hesitate to say this burden is on Apple (Score:5, Interesting)

    by carlhaagen ( 1021273 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @06:51AM (#58430902)
    The function serves its purpose in terms of reducing theft of people's property. The problem is that people don't know that they need to unregister their iPhone from their iCloud account before they sell the phone. Really, that's all you have to do - log in on your iCloud account and remove the device from there, and it's no longer tied to your account and can be repurposed by someone else and their iCloud account without any hassle.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Why would a user who only buys brand spanken new phones know that there was something special they were supposed to after factory resetting their old one? I'd say its more than a little on Apple that they don't have a way to allow phones which have not been reported as stolen to be unlocked. I wouldn't go as far as saying Apple is doing it maliciously, but its clear that they are incentivized not to fix this problem as the prime competitor for the past gen phones they sell are used iphones.

      • Re:I'd hesitate to say this burden is on Apple (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @10:23AM (#58431468)

        Why would a user who only buys brand spanken new phones know that there was something special they were supposed to after factory resetting their old one?

        You don't have to do anything after factory resetting the old phone. But you have to factory reset it.

  • The iCloud activation lock applies to the Apple Watch as well. In my town our state has a warehouse store where they sell government surplus to the public. They also sell items confiscated and lost at airports. Apple Watches turn up on occasion, and I purchased two. The first one was activation locked. There is nothing I can do to make use of this watch. The watch was lost, held by the airport and then the government for many months and never claimed. I bought it legitimately and legally from the gover

    • Apple Watches turn up on occasion, and I purchased two. The first one was activation locked.

      Shouldn't you have checked that before you bought it?

  • Why not just have signs at the donation boxes asking the people donating the phones to unlock and wipe them? Seems like this is just an example of poor PR by the charity groups asking for phones.

  • People here are ignoring the fact that pretty much everything except the battery, the logic board, and the Touch ID parts of an iPhone get reused.

    Jesus Christ, you'd think from reading this that Apple literally shreds locked iPhones. In fact, iPhones probably are recycled more than any other phone because of the fact that its parts are ultra-valuable.

  • Where I work, we used to deploy new iPads to all new full-time employees, when they started a division that developed software apps for the platform. We wound up with a number of useless paperweights when employees turned them in upon leaving but neglected to follow our instructions to unlock them for us first.

    Since then, sure -- we implemented tools to manage them ourselves with MDM, so that problem is behind us. (Heck, we stopped issuing them out anyway - because we restructured things and no longer do th

  • "because phones that are legitimately obtained often still have iCloud enabled, making that phone useless except for parts. "

    That's exactly why we like it. If you steal our phone, you'll have an old battery and a replacement screen and if it's mine, the screen will be cracked on top.

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