Police warn against tracking stolen smartphones, here’s what you should do instead

WATCH ABOVE: All Jeremy Cook wanted was to find his lost cell phone. But when the 18-year-old London, Ont. teen tracked it down, it ended with him losing his life. Jennifer Tryon has the details.

TORONTO – The death of a Brampton teenager who was killed after tracking his lost cellphone has sparked warnings from both police and tech experts.

Jeremy Cook, 18, was shot and killed in London, Ont. Sunday following a dispute over his lost cellphone.

According to reports, Cook used a digital tracking app to trace his phone after leaving it in a cab. After tracing the phone’s location, the teen was involved in an altercation with three suspects and was shot multiple times.

Cook likely used a service like Apple’s Find my iPhone app, which uses the GPS and networking capabilities built into the iPhone to detect its location.

READ MORE: Smartphone thefts drop dramatically in cities with ‘kill switch’ technology

If your phone is lost or stolen and you have location services turned on for the Find my iPhone app, you are able to log on to your account from another device and locate your phone on a map – providing it’s powered on.

Find my iPhone tracks your phone’s location in real time – so there is even the ability to follow its journey live on a map if it’s been left in a car, for example.

But police are now urging the public to avoid confronting thieves themselves when using these apps.

Tech expert Carmi Levy said that while these apps can be incredibly useful, they can make users feel more powerful than they are.

“That’s the problem with these apps – they give us information that can put us into situations that can essentially be incredibly dangerous and in this case tragic,” said technology expert Carmi Levy.

“If you think back to a few years ago before we had access to these apps, once we lost our phones or once it was stolen that was it. We moved on, or we bought a new one and replaced it. Now we have the ability to reach out and know exactly where it is.”

Smartphone theft is a big business – especially when it comes to high-end phones like Apple’s iPhone, which can retail for as much as $1000 unlocked.

In 2013, Vancouver Police went as far to say smartphone thefts were reaching “epidemic levels” and, in 2014, Toronto Police warned of an escalation in violent cellphone thefts after arresting five men in relation to a cellphone theft ring that targeted Apple and Samsung devices.

READ MORE: My cellphone has been stolen, what do I do: How the cellphone blacklist works

Wipe your data

And while a stolen device could mean a blow to your bank account, some may be more concerned about the vast amount of information and memories we now store on our phones. That’s why Levy recommends that users take advantage of cloud storage and back-up solutions to ensure that a backup of that precious data is stored elsewhere.

“We seem to think our phones are our digital lives – we do everything on them,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is thanks to cloud services, all of your photos, all of your data, all of your information is already backed up online.”

Tools like Find my iPhone also give users the ability to remotely wipe the phone in the event it’s been stolen to remove any sensitive data – a step police recommend taking.

Add to blacklist

In the event your cellphone is stolen, you should add it to the cellphone blacklist as soon as possible to help prevent any black market sales of the device.

The cellphone blacklist, launched in October by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), stores the International Mobile Equipment Identity number of devices that have been reported lost or stolen as of Sept. 30, 2013, preventing them from connecting to Canadian service provider networks.

Once a device has been added to the blacklist it will not be able to be activated by a carrier for use – rendering it useless for web browsing, phone calls or texting.