Best 5 Practices for Smartphone Security
Smartphones have eventually captured the mobile device market and replaced the mobile phone market share with huge downfall. A smartly configured phone will offer easy access to mails, browsing, millions of apps, streams videos, plays the latest music, and perform every possible task that a laptop can do. Phone calls have lost their importance in the recent past because video calling facility in Smartphone has replaced the audio medium into an audio-visual medium. With so many advantages, Smartphones majorly compromise on security essentials thus, users need to pay extra attention towards that factor. While selecting a best Smartphone for yourself, friends, family, or any other person, always look for security features, apart from focusing only on looks, storage, and battery life. Many a times, you’ll feel that your smart mobile phone isn’t carrying all the security features that you always wished.
Follow these five best Smartphone security practices to avoid compromising data, privacy, and security of the device:
1. Set a Smartphone security lock code
Everything on your Smartphone, starting from email to texts, phonebook entries, pictures, music, or any other thing holds high privacy factor. Your phone might be a hub of all the personal information that is quite important to save it from potentially prying eyes. It is very important to use a phone lock code if you’re taking your device out of your house. Use a 4-digit PIN, an actual password with letters, numbers, and characters, or a drawing pattern to set a primary lock on your phone’s access. Doing that will not only help in keeping malicious agents or cyber offenders out of accessing your information, but will also let users protect their device from illegitimate use.
2. Enable 'Do Not Track' feature
Many browsers come with information and geolocation tracking features enabled by default. Any website that you’ve accessed using your phone might keep a track of information you provide, or may use it for offering relevant advertisements to you. Google Chrome browser for Android and Safari on iOS comes with ‘Do Not Track’ option that asks websites not to collect your data. Although, this feature does not offer any high-proof guarantee about data collection as some websites will use adhere policies to trace your records.
3. Block your phone number, when required
Sometimes, you look for a business’s contact details and dial up their number from your phone itself. Ideally, you should not do this if you’re not guarded with a robust antivirus as it might prove as a big risk for your Smartphone security. For instance, if you call a random number from your phone, then it is quite possible that the dialed business might collect your number and use it to fetch information attached to it. The best way to come out of such threats is to block any incoming call that isn’t in your phone book. Or you can use Google Voice to call businesses to offer extra protection to your device.
4. Use a recovery app to find a lost or stolen device
Lost or theft is the most uncertain and inconvenient situation that you’ll ever face with your Smartphone. You may panic immediately, when you realize that your Smartphone isn’t in your pocket. To overcome such situations and to offer you optimal support while using Internet security practices, Android and iOS offers amazing device recovery apps. You can use these apps to lock down access to your device and locate its current GPS location.
5. Treat all mobile devices as uncontrolled endpoints
Smartphone users or rather all mobile device users should treat their devices as uncontrolled endpoints because all of them can be easily stolen, hacked, or inappropriately shared. Your Smartphone can get lost, stolen or borrowed, but can also be recovered using the Device identification technology that traces down its location. This technology is helpful in allowing IT technicians to remotely disable your device and erase all sensitive data to restrict any illegitimate activity.
All of the above-mentioned tips will help you protect your latest mobiles from getting lost, compromised, or used for any illegitimate activity. You can also install a robust antivirus program to assure that your mobile devices stay protected from the entire Internet security issues. Apart from this, you can refrain yourself from using public hotspots, stop connecting your Smartphones to unreliable sources, and use device’s in-built security features to protect it from various threats. If you require some advanced protection, then manage your device’s Wi-Fi functionality and if you’re using it for corporate wireless networks then keep a check on the running traffic through a comprehensive firewall.
About the Author: Hi! I am Brook M. Perry, a prolific blog writer and keen author of articles related to computer security and solution for issues related to computers and mobile devices. Being associated with the reputed best pc tuneup service provider Qresolve, I have resolved thousands of tech issues for our customers from worldwide. computer virus removal My areas of interest are PC security, endpoint security system, router support etc.