Someone Stole Your Cell Phone? Tell It to Phone Home

Maverick Mobile Solutions, an Indian company that makes mobile applications, has a new way to protect your cell phone: tell it to follow the lead of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and “phone home.”

Or, to bring E.T. into the 21st century, “text home.”

If your phone is lost or stolen, the application, called Maverick Secure Mobile, encrypts your data, sends you a text message with the location of the phone and, best of all, plays an annoyingly loud siren to torture the thief.

The application was unveiled at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, Calif., this week, where it provided a few minutes of “comic relief,” according to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat.

The Maverick software is hidden on a phone, so a potential thief can’t tell whether or not your phone has it. You give the company a second phone number — your spouse’s or a friend’s, for example. As soon as a thief replaces your SIM card with his own, the phone encrypts all of your remaining data, like your phone book, photos or text messages, so the thief can’t see them. It also sends that data to your second phone so that you have it. - nytimes