Seems a bit rough to post the guy’s photo online. He didn’t steal the phone and may be trying to return it.
Maybe, but at the moment this is the only way to connect “guy who lost his phone” to “guy who has a phone, but no idea who it belongs to”.
When I find a phone I wish to return I answer it. This guy won’t.
Fair point but why doesn’t he just take out the sim?
You’d be amazed how uninformed the some criminals is on how smartphones and other computers work.
Pretty sure it involves magnets.
ETA - I swear to god I have seen this guy. Like maybe on a Facebook forum? I dunno. Maybe he just has one of those faces.
Not nearly as rough as calling him a “gentleman.”
I must assume the son either disabled, or they don’t know about, Android device manager to track the phone via gps…
I see everyone’s gotten the memo that white middle aged guys don’t steal things. Splendid.
Nah, just that they’re not very good at it. Probably used to stealing staplers and welcome mats. This might be his first big heist. At least give the guy a chance to prove his thievery chops before smearing his street cred.
omg he stole the face too!
First thing I thought as well. Were it a black guy, these would have been “pictures of the thief”. But a white guy is “a man who has someone else’s smartphone” because, y’know, he might sue you for defamation or something.
If it was a black guy there probably wouldn’t have been a BB post at all. Because, y’know, of course. Not news. Also, too racially-stereotypey for a progressive blog like this one.
Nope: http://boingboing.net/2008/10/30/cell-phone-thief-tak.html
To be fair, that guy was a thief. This guy is only likely a thief. Still.
What do you mean “still”? That’s not making a point. You recognize they’re two different cases (a theft that was witnessed vs a person possessing a stolen phone) and that outright calling a person a thief is probably a bad idea from a defamation of a character standpoint, but you’re still mad at BB for a thing you imagine they would do differently but they haven’t actually done differently. How would you prefer they’d handled this?
Since BB is big on hyperbolic, clickbaity headlines, I think a better headline would have been “Do you know this ugly asshole that stole some poor teenager’s phone?”
+1 android device manager or better still does the picture have location imbedded? That’ll get you to his office, then a few nice posters in the area… shame the fuck outta the guy.
I get that everyone wants to talk about race here, but the missing semantic difference is that this story refers to the phone as “lost” and not stolen. If it were said to be stolen, I would be right with you on the outrage point.
