Do you sometimes feel guilty that perhaps you don’t do enough to protect your non-Chapman issued smartphone?  Consider these steps to protect your personal smartphone:

  1. Don’t use a simple passcode.
    If your phone falls into the wrong hands, 1111 or 0000 for a passcode will not be in your favor.

  2. Enable the auto lock feature.
    If you walk away from your phone or lose it, this easy fix will at least give you some piece of mind that someone isn not sifting through your personal information.

  3. Set the phone to erase itself after 10 incorrect password tries.
    Given enough time, an unauthorized user of your phone may actually guess the code.

  4. Apply updates immediately after they become available.
    Updates and vulnerabilities often go hand-in-hand.  The less you maintain the freshness of your phone then the higher the chance it may crash, fail, or be susceptible to other security issues.

  5. Don’t jailbreak your phone’s operating system.
    Jail breaking a phone may actually open up private areas of your phone to questionable 3rd party apps.  Do you trust every app you have installed?

  6. Scrutinize each apps privilege – especially GPS & Bluetooth.
    Not only is Bluetooth a potentially wide open door, but it or GPS can run your battery life down quickly.  If the app doesn’t require GPS or Bluetooth, then turn it off.

  7. Clear cookies and cache in the web browser (regularly).
    Cookies and cache will hog your smartphone’s resources and may leave a trail to the secret codes needed to get into your private business.  Wipe your browser cache every so often.

  8. Don’t use the same password as the ones for work or banking.
    You can raise the odds against privacy intruders by using different passwords between your devices and uses.

  9. Turn off the lock screen notification feature – an SMS may have private info.
    Congratulations on enabling the lock screen feature – now take it a step further and turn off the ability for your private text messages to be visible to any casual observer.