14 DAY TRIAL // The mother of a 9-month-old girl is trying to retrieve her stolen iPhone, or at least the pictures stored on the flash memory, after dropping the device in a taxi during a business trip to Beijing.
Xie Danhong, 33, said the photos and video clips on her iPhone are invaluable. The device was jailbroken at the time she lost it, and it was loaded with an app called iGotYa. The software snaps a photo of the person holding the phone as they try to unlock it.
"I immediately recognized the guy in the picture, as the driver of the taxi that day," said Xie. Just like the woman who had her iPhone stolen on a cruise ship, Xie posted the image online hoping someone would recognize the man.
While the idea behind this app may sound brilliant at first, it poses quite a few concerns. Attorney Yi Shenghua at Yingke Law Firm in Beijing, said "The person in the picture may just have been attempting to find out who the phone belonged to.”
But Xie made it clear in an interview with the China Daily that, “If the thief wants the phone, he can have it, but the contacts and pictures it contains are really important to me. I have no backup."
The report mentions that this is not the first time IGotYa makes a catch. Huang Zongce, a 28-year-old man from Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, reportedly found his iPhone just hours after he too had lost it in a taxi in April.
He used the information captured by his phone’s camera to trace back his device to a a family home, “and eventually got it back after negotiating.”
"I wasn't really worried when I lost it," Huang said. "I know my phone is well protected."
Thing is, IGotYa requires a jailbroken iPhone. Considering that anyone can be regarded as a thief when this thing kicks into gear, you can imagine why Apple will never approve this in the App Store.