Secure your smartphone or tablet
Short Tips
- +They won’t get my smartphone?
- Smartphones have the shortest life span of all electronic devices. If you think about it, the average age of smartphones is 1,5 years. If you count the amount of information (pictures, apps, access to data, passwords, bank apps, …) it holds and how careless we use it once they get replaced by the newest model, we jeopardize a lot of information about ourselves.
- +Technical solution?
- As this article already shows, there are a lot of known patterns and it is better not to use them. More and more smartphones are being equipped with fingerprints, iris scan and facial recognition. Please take into account that these solutions have to go in the same small device. It is known that the fingerprint solution of smartphones is already satisfied if your fingerprint matches 80% with what you set up.
This makes the fingerprint solution even weaker security than a weak password. A device with so much information needs to be better protected.
- +What if I get rid of the device?
If we buy a new smartphone, all our attention goes to this new device. All its new features and apps impress us. The only thing we want to know is how to transfer the pictures on the old device to the new device, and we are done. Afterwards, the old device can go to the container park.
But we are forgetting the most important thing. Our old device still contains all apps and passwords that we use, access to our banking app, etc. These devices are often recycled or get a second life, what happens to this information then? Do you really want to leave this up to another person, someone you do not know and from whom you do not know their intentions?
No, it’s not. So make sure your device is fully cleared and if you cannot do it yourself, ask the vendor of the new device, who is probably already transferring all information for you.
Pay attention to the amount of information our smartphones hold.
- Keep them safe
- Use different passwords for different apps
- Do not share your security settings with anyone
- Make sure the device is fully cleared when replacing it
- Use Android and iOS functionalities in case of loss (remote wipe etc)
If you pay more attention to your device and the information it holds, you will need less effort afterwards to handle the consequences.
How to's
Secure your smartphone or tablet against theft
Devices are getting smaller and smaller and thus are getting easy to take with you everywhere. This unfortunately also means that they can be forgotten on a train or in a bar, or even worse, get stolen.
Knowing that your smartphone holds a lot of information of you, it is important to secure it well. This can be done in several ways; such as using a pin of minimum 4 numbers, a password or a pattern.
Make sure that they are not too easy to guess, use a strong password. Do not use a pin such as 1111 and 1234. A pattern is also difficult to hack but you can better avoid the use of the patterns in the image because they are often used.
Furthermore, it is possible that you can unravel the pattern on the basis of the finger smudges on the screen. So, clean your screen on a regular basis so that the last prints can no longer be discovered.
Another good security is to use your own pattern or points on a picture that do not limit you to 9 points.
The newer devices of today also have fingerprint and facial recognition and even an iris scan is possible on the more expensive models. However, this is easy to scam. When you are buying a new device, make sure to ask about the security. You cannot assume that when a device has fingerprint security, that the manufacturer has chosen for a proper and trustworthy technology. The purpose is to better secure the device, however, with the wrong technology, the opposite will often be the case.
