Identity Theft and Your Smart Phone - Protection Advice

Hey you. Yes you. Right now, people are trying to steal from you. They want your money and your good name and credit. Don't make it easy for them. Today's smart phone is much more than just a phone, its a phone, address book, appointment book, file cabinet, personal data file. How many of you have things like your frequent flyer account numbers, bank account numbers, stock account numbers and more clearly marked in your smart phone. Some people even store passwords and full credit card numbers in there.

In the old days, if your phone was lost or stolen, your friends may get some weird calls if someone found the phone. Now, if your phone or PDA is lost or stolen, a thief can ruin your life in an hour. They can steal your money and also change passwords for your email accounts and that's just the beginning. Imagine your own device, how easy could anyone find all that essential data, clearly marked and listed. It may be more dangerous than if you lost a credit card. A credit card can be cancelled, thus removing the owner from responsibility for fraudulent charges. If someone steals all your data, they can go to town on your dime.

Solution? Use the security features you have. Enable them. All of them. Call your providers customer service and ask about the features and how to enable, access and use them. Look in the device's manual for the features offered. All units offer various layers of security, most users don't want to hassle with it. Remember, plan for the worst, what would happen if that phone fell out on the subway or walking down the street and someone with evil intent picked it up.Here's what I do. I have an older Blackberry 7290. I have it password protected, and its timed to lock up every five minutes. Yes, I have to type the password in a lot over the day, but if its ever lost, it locks itself so fast, the potential for damage is minimized. Also, the Blackberry password has a self-destruct feature of sorts. If you get the wrong password 10 times, it erases all the data and resets like from the factory. It happened to me once and wasn't pretty. So if the unit is ever lost or stolen, I know the password feature comes up in 5 minutes, preventing problems.Also make sure you always use the backup software for your device and back it up often to your computer. Again, imagine that phone being lost, if you get a replacement and have backed up your data, you can be good to go fairly quickly. Choose passwords carefully. For example, don't pick newyork123, pick 3gH4Tn!s. Use upper and lower case, a mix of letters and numbers and also ! and ?.