Continuing the Choose Privacy Week theme, another great topic to cover is your phone. In addition to adjusting your privacy settings on social media, we think it’s important to be just as safe with your mobile device, something many people need and use constantly throughout the day to handle important tasks. Here are some tips to protect your phone from identity theft, a common way to incur unwanted credit card debt.
Practice These 5 Tips To Keep Your Phone Protected
1. First and foremost, lock your phone with a password. Think about all the important information anyone can access within seconds of picking it up if you lost it. Email, banking, pictures, everything. Consumer reports relayed that 1.4 million phones were lost last year and never recovered.
2. Check before you download. Before downloading a new app, investigate what information it requires. If anything needs a location, passwords for other applications or other personal information, deny access.
3. Be wary of public WiFi. Any common hacker can set up a WiFi hotspot in the same coffee shop you are in with a very similar looking network and collect any information people are exposing around them on that network. Avoid banking if you have to use public WiFi to protect yourself from identity theft.
4. Always look for “https” in the url intead of “http” when browsing and especially shopping. The “s” means that the site is secure.
5. Use the “find my phone” app. Both Adroid and iPhone have these applications available to make it easy to find your phone if you lose it and anyone who finds it to be able to communicate with you.
Much of the world has gone almost primarily mobile, and although that makes our lives easier, this also creates more opportunities for crooks to gain access to our information.
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