Apple Adding Surveillance, Data Scrambling To Find My iPhone?

Patents can mean everything or nothing, so take this with big ol’ salt grains, but Apple’s thinking about seriously beefing up its Find My iPhone service. Most notable? New ways to spy on a thief and remotely scramble your stuff.

Patently Apple reports that the improved security would let you render your phone useless without erasing it entirely (so you could retrieve your data if you ever get it back), and would sport a “surveillance mode”, in which “the mobile device records or captures information associated with one or more of user actions, ambient sound, images, a trajectory of the device, and transmits the recorded or captured information to the network resource.” So, spying on the guy who ripped you off. This could be a huge help to police and/or iPhone vigilantes.

Again, just a patent, but we wouldn’t mind finding these powers in our hand when our phone’s taken from it. [Patently Apple]