Apple Files “Heartbeat” Patent To Track JailBroken iPhones

Potentially flying in the face of a US court-ruling which says the practice of “jailbreaking” Apple’s iPhone is legal, Apple has filed a patent which attempts to identify devices which have undergone the process of being opened for use with any network provider

Reports emerged this week of the patent application which relates to “identifying unauthorized users of an electronic device”, which names Apple as the patent filer. Rather than trying to prevent devices being jailbroken, the patent is concerned with identifying the user of the device.

The text of the patent pushes the idea that it is mainly concerned with remotely activating the phone’s microphone or camera or even a potential heartbeat sensor in the event that an iPhone is lost or stolen and used by a third party. “A method for identifying an unauthorized user of an electronic device, the method comprising: determining that a current user of the electronic device is an unauthorized user,” the application states.

Hacking Electronic Devices

However the patent application also mentions “jailbreaking” devices as an instance where Apple would like to be able to detect who is using the phone remotely. “The method of claim 3, wherein the particular activity comprises one or more of hacking the electronic device, jailbreaking the electronic device, unlocking the electronic device, removing a SIM card from the electronic device, and moving at least a predetermined distance away from a synced device,” the patent application states.

A number of methods are proposed for identifying “illegal users” including a potential heart-rate sensor. “a heartbeat sensor operable to detect the heartbeat of the current user; and wherein the processor is further operable to: compare the detected heartbeat with heart signatures of each authorized user of the electronic device; and determine that detected the heartbeat does not match the heart signature of any authorized user of the electronic device,” the application states.

US Copyright Office

In late July, Apple lost a bid to have jailbreaking the iPhone declared a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress sided with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s contention that jailbreaking the iPhone was not prohibited by the act.

Following the legal ruling, analysts pointed out that Apple was unlikely to give up on trying to prevent iPhones from being opened-up. “A major part of how Apple assures quality and profit is control over their ecosystem,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group, wrote in a 27 July e-mail to eWEEK. “They won’t give up that control easily but they will likely find, as Microsoft certainly did, that governments are more powerful than they are.”