Is Your Phone Ready to Be Stolen?
Weekly Wheaties #2622
In this newsletter:
📝 Post: Is Your Phone Ready to Be Stolen?
🗞️ In Case You Missed It: AI Updates
🗞️ In Case You Missed It: The Ferrari Luce
😎 Pick of the Week: Geography Picks
📦 Featured Product: Kidde Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector
📝 Is Your Phone Ready to Be Stolen?
After cleaning up/out your phone to help manage the storage, there is some more spring cleaning you should consider. Previously, I wrote how to Prepare Your Phone to be Lost, Stolen, or Damaged. As well as, What Should You Do After You’ve Been Hacked? However, there is always more to do in the safety world, and things can and do change. For a quick refresh, some of the main things you should verify for theft protection include:
Create a pin number not easily guessed
Turn on password/pin/face ID access on any available apps
Use a password manager
Create frequent backups
Use MFA on any available accounts
Have family or friends share location with Find My or Life 360
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), or sometimes referred to as two-factor authentication, is simply a second way of proving you are who you say you are when logging into an account. You can read a bit more about Staying Safe Online Through Hacks, Phishing, and Scams in Weekly Wheaties #2434. Most people (and by most, probably 99% of people) use their main phone as their device that either receives their MFA text or notification. So what happens when you lose your phone or it becomes stolen?
Well, the easiest way may be something you haven’t considered. If you are like the majority of other smartphone users, to the tune of 70%, you probably have never sold your old smartphone. So, why not use it? If not, there are ways to allow any of your other devices (an older phone, iPad, Android tablet, Mac, or PC) to also receive a copy of your text messages. This device can also double as a backup for your Password Manager, as well as any Authenticator-type app you have.
Depending on how private you’d like to keep your lock screen, you may prevent notification previews from appearing or turn off message preview. While this may be inconvenient at some level when using your phone daily, it could be beneficial if your phone is ever stolen. And I’ve said before, the highest level of safety also comes with the lowest level of convenience. You must weigh the importance of each for your use.
Typically, the easiest and/or quickest way to sign out of your accounts is to simply login and change your password with the given account. Most services will allow a “sign out everywhere” option. However, remember if you have MFA or an Authenticator app setup (as you should), make sure you have quick access to it to keep any thief from getting to it first. One other suggestion I give is to backup your MFA QR codes. When setting up an account with MFA, you typically have to scan a QR code with your phone. You can screenshot these, print them, or save the QR code to a locked note. This will allow easier setup on another device if needed. Make sure this is a secure location, though.
If your phone ever is stolen, there is one more preventive step you may take. And this is a a bit complicated and convoluted, but it does work! What this does, is setup an automation (which you have to kick off) through the Shortcuts app that does one or more of the following steps on your phone:
Turns on low power mode (to preserve battery until found)
Turns brightness to the lowest setting
Locks the device and requires FaceID to unlock
Disables control center (to keep the thief from putting your phone in airplane mode)
Pro-tip here: you can also disable control center without FaceID all the time (or remove airplane mode as an option)
Takes a front and rear facing photo
Make sure to disable the “Show camera preview” option in the settings
Gets current device location
Sends the picture and location to another contact in your phone (text or email)
This can be completed by a few ways. The most common includes having a text message received. For example, you can set a specific message/word to start the automation (e.g. “stolen phone”). You may also have this automation run every [5] minutes. Another tip is to set this up anytime airplane mode is turned on (as is the most common things thieves do when stealing a phone). You can also make airplane mode turn back on after some time and lock the screen as a second deterrent.
As mentioned, this can be a bit complicated to setup, but you can use a shortcut others have already created. On iPhone, you can watch this video how to create this shortcut or simply download it here. On Android, this process isn’t as straightforward, but there are third-party apps to do something very similar. Check out the most recommended one - Anti-theft Alarm Phone Tracker by Cerberus. For live tracking, you may login to your Apple account through Find Devices or on Android through Google’s location-tracking tool. Apple also offers a Stolen Device Protection Feature that would be beneficial to setup.
If your phone is lost for good, a desperate and final measure is to remotely lock and wipe it. This will hopefully remove all of your data and make the device unusable for whoever has it - including your payment methods. Here’s how to Erase an Apple device in Find Devices on iCloud.com and how to Find, secure, or erase a lost Android device.
What other steps are you taking to secure your device if it may ever become lost or stolen?
🗞️ ICYMI: AI Updates
Last week, Pope Leo shared his Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas, on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Personally, I haven’t been able to read it all yet, but did want to share for those of you who may be interested before I may even be able to provide a response. It’s been reported that in it, he Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’. With Google coming off of their I/O hype reported on last week, their CEO, Sundar Pichai, shares how he understands why people are anxious about A.I.. It appears both at least believe AI is a very profound piece of technology, even if they disagree on where the future should go or how to get there.
To help share what AI can and is doing, Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s Right-Hand Man Who’s Unleashing AI at Meta. They’ve been integrating AI a lot lately, so much so, they’ve let go thousands of employees. At Meta, “Boz” is working on a future where AI agents perform much of the work while employees focus on directing, reviewing, and improving the output. In other Meta 9or Facebook) news, they also Launched Forum, a New Reddit-Like Standalone App for Facebook Groups. It’s currently only available on iOS.
🗞️ ICYMI: The Ferrari Luce
Ferrari Launched their $640,000, Jony Ive-Designed, Glass-Clad Electric Speedster. It’s been getting a lot of headlines, and most are… well… fairly negative. With exception. Most people praise the interior, but dislike the exterior. Since it was designed by a group of former Apple execs, there is a lot of sentiment that this is just what “the Apple car would have been.” And whether you agree or not, if this car had an Apple (or any other car brand) badge on it instead of Ferrari, and came in under $100,000, I think the feedback would have been more optimistic and positive. It’s the price matched with a look that’s not Ferrari. While the former Ferrari chairman publicly criticized the vehicle, the current Ferrari CEO says first EV racks up orders despite criticism. Visit Ferrari.com and change the look in the configurator to see for yourself!
😎 POTW: Geography Picks
While things in the tech space have changed over time, so has our geography. Check out your area over time through Paleolatitude or OldMapsOnline. Then have some fun with a geography game, or spell your name from satellite images.
📦 Featured Product
If you own a home, eventually you’ll need to replace a smoke detector or two. And you may opt for a the Kidde Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector. It comes in a hard-wired (with battery backup) or battery only variants. The voice alerts help specify if the alert is for smoke or carbon monoxide, and the interconnectivity allows all within range to be alerted when one is set off. An inconvenience at times, yes, but it could also help save your life. Consider adding at least one Kidde App Enabled model. This would alert your phone should you not be home when the alarms go off. Only one smart alarm is needed to notify on behalf of the others should they be interconnected.
