Lock Down Your Smartphones and Tablets

Look about, how many communications devices do you have available to you at this moment? Your smartphone, your laptop, your tablet, your desktop, and any number of devices within your home which are controlled by these other devices, welcome to our family Internet of Things (IOT).

No longer do we dial our family and friends by telephone number, we click on their avatar or name and the device does the rest. We click on an application and read our email, or engage in banking. We even upload information we need for business, medical or personal meetings to have on hand. The commonality with each of these mobile devices? They all contain valuable and sensitive information.

What happens when you are separated from your device? Nothing if you have set your pin code and settings correctly.

1. Set your PIN -- Personal Identification Number passcode lock on your device
2. Also set your auto-lock settings on your device -- in this manner if you are sitting in a cafe for example speaking on the phone and someone grabs and steals it, they have stolen a device that is locked.
3. Do not use your address, date of birth, social security number, telephone number or bank pin -- use a unique number and use as many numbers as available. Most use between four and six
4. Set your device to automatically lockup and destroy all data after 10 tries to force the combination. In this manner, an individual can't run through the 10,000 possible combinations and get in, the odds aren't zero, but you've brought them very close to zero. For the iPhone/iPad It may necessitate putting the "Find my phone" application on your iPhone.

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This article by Christopher Burgess is crossposted from Senior Online Safety with permission.