If you surf the news as much as we do you will notice the glaring amount of reports about smartphone thefts, some of these stories sadly even involve the death of the victim. It would be easily surmised that in some of these cases the fact that the victim might not have wanted to relinquish the device for whatever reason figured into their ultimate demise.

Ownership is just such a strong emotion; it causes us to do stupid things such as attempting to protect a piece of technology that certainly can be easily replaced along with any information stored inside. I mean it is just a smartphone right? The problem isn’t so much the phone, it seems that it is more the information contained inside and the fact that someone other than you might be looking at it.

Even if for you it is the actual phone itself, one company looks to solve both issues; the actual device itself and the information inside.

Absolute Software offers for $30 per year, a service that will allow owners of the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone to either track or render the device useless if it's lost or stolen.

The LA Times spoke with Absolute Chief Executive John Livingston, who described the two options as the perfect combination.

“If you’ve been harmed or have no backup, you want some recourse and some insight into who’s got the phone and where did it go,” he said. “If it’s old and lost in the back of a cab and you have it all backed up, you can just brick it.”

Absolute’s LoJack for tablets and laptops has 6 million paid subscribers, Livingston said. Hundreds of devices are recovered each week, with a majority of customers opting to track and investigate instead of kill.

Livingston said 5,000 convictions have been based on its LoJack data. More than 30,000 cases have been solved.

Prosecutors and law enforcement officials nationwide have been demanding that smartphone makers embed strong theft-deterrence technologies in phones. And Samsung’s move with its 3-month-old Galaxy S4 is being applauded as a step in the right direction.