According to the Pew Research Center – 95 percent of all American’s own a cell phone and 77 percent own a smartphone (Pew Research Center, 2018). We do everything with these devices, check email, send and store photos, manage banking accounts, and more. Therefore, protecting our smart phones is more important than ever as more criminals look to compromise these devices.
Here are few tips that you can do to help protect your data and privacy on your smartphones:
Lock your device – One of the best ways of protecting your smart phone is to configure your device to automatically lock after a specific time and enabling either the pin code, finger-print or face recognition to unlock the device. If your device is lost or stolen when locked, the thief will only be able to reset the device without gaining access to the data stored on the device.
Install OS and Application Updates Regularly – It is imperative to update the applications and operating system on your phone often. Patching your phone and any installed applications fixes potential security threats. On most smart phones, you can configure your operating system to update automatically.
Avoid public Wi-Fi networks – Like your PC, avoid using unknown open Wi-Fi networks on your phone because malicious hotspots can intercept any data you enter without you even knowing it.
Enable remote wiping – If your phone is ever lost or stolen you can remotely wipe the device from afar. This can be done with relative ease on iPhones by enabling “Find My Phone” or on an Android device by enabling “Lock & Erase” in the settings.
Back up your phone – Keeping a regular backup of your device is a great way to restore your data if your device becomes lost or stolen. You can configure most devices to backup automatically.
With the amount we each use our smart phones, it is important we take the same protective measures as used on our computer to secure our data on all devices.
Source: Pew Research Center. (2018, February 5). Mobile Fact Sheet. Retrieved from Pew Research Center - Internet & Technology: http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/
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