Why Don’t We See More GPS In Consumer Electronics?

April 30th, 2007 Davis Posted in Technology, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TiVo |

San Francisco may be the city of love, but that doesn’t mean that I still don’t walk around with a roll of quarters in my pocket. We had another car break-in, on my street this weekend and my building is starting to get upset. They are posting a reward for information, but I don’t think that they will have much luck.

It’s probably the fourth break-in we’ve had in just the last month. Most of the time, it’s safe to park here, but if you have a nice car radio, GPS unit, or lots of spare change in your ash tray, then say good night to your window and whatever system you’ve got loaded in your dash. We even had one thief break into our building, in order to steal the security monitors, while he was being recorded At best, the monitors could have a $20 street value, but he probably did $300 worth of damage, to the door alone just to get at them.

I’m the last one to ever advocate that we start tracking everyone, but whenever I see someone lose property, it makes me wonder why we haven’t seen greater developments in GPS technology? We have GPS chips in our cell phones, but if they get stolen, it’s rare that we use them to catch the criminals. Lojack protects vehicles, but what about my 60″ television, my TiVo series 3, my Xbox 360? I’d almost rather get those back, than my car, at least my car has insurance. I can let the bank eat that

I don’t know what kind of technology it takes to put a GPS chip into a consumer electronics device, but given how far technology has come, it’s hard for me to believe that we shouldn’t be able to track stolen consumer electronics when people are paying out thousands of dollars for cutting edge equipment. If they wanted to charge some kind of recovery fee, I could understand, but so far, I haven’t seen a viable way to secure all of this high tech junk from theft.

Security protections don’t just have to be limited to GPS either. Two weeks ago, a guy on my street tried to sell me a brand new laptop for $60. There is no reason why that laptop’s serial number, shouldn’t be able to set off alarm bells, the minute anyone tries to access the net. I know that there are solutions out there for people to buy, but this isn’t something Dell should be selling as an upgrade, it should be a default function with an activation fee, so that consumers have access to it, when they need it.

I’m not naive enough to believe that we can get rid of theft, but if we could make it a lot harder for the common criminal to buy and sell stolen property, it would go a long way towards detering theft. At that very least, it would make me feel better knowing that I had caught the creep, even if it did end up costing a 20% recovery fee.