Much noise was made about it being legal for you to jailbreak your phone and there wasn’t much Apple could do about it other than saying you will break your warranty if you do that. It turns out though that Apple could be working on a way to get around that legal nit-picking thing – at least according to a patent Apple has applied for.
Titled Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device the patent describes a number of ways that a device could sense who is using an iPhone or iPad. Whether it be your heartbeat, or voice print analysis, or even noting particular activities that can indicate suspicious behavior the idea is that you could be locked out of your device.
Many of the tech blogs I have read are talking up this as being a good thing citing such things as automatic personalization of the device as well as locking out nasty people like thieves and hackers. The idea is that once detected sensitive data could be backed up to a cloud server and then wiped from the local device. As well a picture could be taken and along with GPS information emailed as an alert to the real owner or sent to a cloud service.
In principal this seems like a really good idea but given how Apple is such a control freak and have done everything they can do to lock down the iOS I wonder if with the right legal wording that this kind of “safety feature” could be used against jailbreakers?
