The Home Office’s John Reid has bounded over the pond to New York City (a week ahead of the iPhone launch in the New World, I feel I must add) in order to implore mobile phone execs to consider maybe possibly including some slightly more drastic security features in their next generation of smartphones.

Now that’s not a bad idea, given how much the damn things cost. And it’s not a bad idea given how many of the damn things get stolen. Okay, just two per cent of the good people of the UK have their handset pinched in any given year, but that (apparently) works out to about 800,000 annually, according to the Home Office’s British Crime Survey.  

So, to battle this horror, the HO’s head honcho asked the leaders of the mobile phone world to consider if it’s possible/practical to do the following:

- disable functions, such as a camera or mp3 player, when a phone is reported stolen;

- automatically shut down a pilfered handset, not just the sim card;

- allow a missing handset to communicate its whereabouts to the police;

- use biometrics to secure phones.

To be fair, they also want a way to highlight security levels of different handset models – I’m sure the industry will be all over that one – and find ways to prevent criminal using stolen phones for crime, which are both admirable aims.

But I’m pretty sure I don’t want my phone traceable or controllable by the police. And I definitely don’t want something so easily stolen as a handset to be storing my biometric data – especially not if such data is going to be trading at a premium because of its impending inclusion on passports and ID cards. If the good folks of the mobile manufacturing world can find a way to include biometrics on a shiny new handset, then the bad folks of identity theft world will have no trouble getting such data off of a pilfered one.

Besides, all this work and effort and R&D and then all this debate about privacy versus security looks pretty ridiculous when lined up against another statistic offered by the HO: 69 per cent of mobile phone thefts happened because the handset was left unattended. (Full disclosure: I’ve lost two phones in purses stolen from pubs; inattentive drunks like me are probably skewing the results.)

So we don’t need more technology. No, we just need to keep a better eye on our stuff. Of course better security is an aim worth considering at development stage. But unless someone can develop a technology that prevents stupidity and/or drunkenness and/or absentmindedness, 69 per cent of us are still out of luck…

I’ve spent a large portion of this week thinking about technology of the future – how schools, hospitals and the justice system will look in the next ten, fifteen and twenty years.

Here’s the thing: all the technology has already been invented. We have proximity readers and flatscreens and wireless for schools. We have RFID tracking and tablet computers and scanners for hospitals. And we have all sorts of information and data management for the world of police, courts and prisons.

Yet all these devices and tools of today are being citied as technology of the future. Why? Because they haven’t been deployed yet.

Who would have thought that technology would be the easy part and project management the tough part?