Your phone will self-destruct in 10 seconds
Should you decide to accept this as the best for your phone (and the data within), this may be you wish for. Imagine that it’s stolen or you accidentally left it in a taxi, a cafe or drop it don’t know where! Well, I did that 3 times and only once I got it back through a super nice guy. If you are not sure you are always that lucky, then don’t make erasing your data in it a “Mission Impossible”. It can easily be done and I strongly suggest that you take immediate steps to ensure that you can, do it now and you can have a carefree life! Smart mobiles have become many’s sole tool to communicate with the world as well as get things efficiently done online – like transferring money, online purchases, very personal information of yourself, your friends and your work place, etc. You might not be aware, but your phone (and in fact the internet) gathers and stores many of such key information all the time in cookies, etc especially re log-in information sometimes without the users being aware of it. The lure of convenient and efficient operations via your mobile (and they indeed are) is so great that one may sometimes/inadvertently be tempted, and the information will be stored there. While these information are mostly stored on your own computer or your own mobile, once they land on someone with a bad/greedy intent (easily through multiple sales, etc), your loss can be catastrophic. A recent video shows how someone’s identity was stolen via his mobile, and he lost his entire life’s savings/everything over a couple of hours. I certainly hope that this will never happen to you, but you can sleep better if you’re confident that you’re still in control of it even if you lost it. So do make immediate steps to protect your data (just as important as making backups – see my previous blog post). This can easily be done:-
- iPhone users – super easy but you must/need to enable Find My iPhone (or iPad, or Mac) on your iOS device of choice. Tap into Settings, then tap iCloud. Scroll to the bottom and toggle Find My iPhone to ON (see below). Once you did that, your phone can be controlled remotely via another computer with access to your iCloud. You can choose to set to “Lost” mode (which means you think you can hopefully retrieve it later and your phone screen will just show your phone no.). But if you think you are not that lucky, then just “Wipe” the entire data within it! This article shows in details if you want further details/instructions.
- Android phone users – Use ADM (Android Device Manager)Enabling ADM is extremely easy. Basically, you use a google account which you should have set up in your phone (to receive gmails, use google maps, etc), then ADM would have that information when you log on from any computer (with your google account password), and you can remotely control (ring, lock or erase) your phone. You may already have this capability if you have set this up already and gave the necessary permissions (including”Allow remote lock and factory reset.”). For example, on my LG G4, it’s in Settings/Personal/Security/Phone Administrators. You can also check this out on any computer/smartphone here. This article explains in details of how to set it up if you have not yet. Once set up and accessed from your computer, the location of your phone will be shown and you have a choice to ring, lock (by giving a very secure PIN of yours then) or erase everything in it. If you still have hope of getting it back, then locking it may be the best temporarily option, but I would not risk this for too long before erasing everything in it.
