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I knew someone would mention OnStar.

OnStar's anti-theft feature requires it to be initiated by the police. Not some rando who stole it and signed in with his own Apple ID... It is a premium service that requires you pay a monthly fee.

Nor does it permanently brick it; it can be unlocked by any dealer, or more likely once the police recover the car. In fact you could probably just remove the OnStar box and the car would be drivable.... it's designed to stop a theft in progress.

Most importantly, if you don't pay for the service it does nothing at all.

Basically the opposite of everything that went wrong in this article.



> Most importantly, if you don't pay for the service it does nothing at all.

Until someone gets in to onstar's systems and activates this for every device at once.


Yeah, it's a leaky analogy and doesn't quite compare. The biggest difference with cars is that they're titled and so ownership is much easier to prove. Although, if you have title issues with property you can also get yourself into quite a difficult situation. In the case of Apple products, Activation Lock more or less functions like a digital title system.


If it can be unlocked by any dealer than it can be probably unlocked by bad actors as well.




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