I think the argument hidden in the headline here is that since this is a device owned by a congressman, and allowed inside this particular meeting, it has information on it that may be confidential, and therefore needs a much stronger password.
My phone has access to my email, phone number, texting.
With these 3 things you can get into my bank account, access to my domains, and into any online account I hold.
Then, personally and professionally, I manage other peoples' accounts, so, with my phone, you can probably social-engineer your way into those as well.
My point is, if you are married, have a job, email, or have other people in your life that you don't want to go through an identity theft crisis, or get hacked, stalked, etc, you should lock your phone.
Maybe you aren't the target, but you are the wide-open back door into their life.
I don't manage other peoples accounts from my phone.
My passwords are stored in an encrypted file, accessible only by entering my pin.
My email app has a pin lock.
I don't use the browser to login to any important sites like banking sites.
If you get my phone, the most you can do is order something for me on Amazon (it will be shipped to me, else you have to enter your own credit card) or you can mess with my GitHub content.
Considering that both your password and email are protected by pins, why not have a pin on the device too?
Someone installing an app to catch pins that I typed in and then giving me back my phone...then waiting until I typed a pin and stealing my phone again seems like a bit of a hassle. Out of curiosity though - what app in the app store allows you to do this? Or, do they have to jail break my phone to do it?
I'm not really trying to argue that my way is better. I'm just giving my personal point of view. It works for me. I just don't worry about things and shit seems to work out. I leave my house unlocked all the time. Same with my car. I leave the keys in the car when I go into stores.
It's just stuff. Perhaps if someone stole everything from me, I'd be even more free than I am now.
Why would you have to steal it again?
> Or, do they have to jail break my phone to do it?
They will most likely have to jailbreak it.
> I just don't worry about things and shit seems to work out.
Yeah, sure, nobody ever said it happens often, it's for the time it happens that it save you so much trouble.
A friend got his credit card stolen recently, no big deal, I'm in Canada and the bank take all the blame in theses cases. It still was way too much trouble to get a new card because the guy changed his card information and the bank couldn't validate his identity.
It's not always about what you may lose, it's about what may happens to get back from it.
> It's just stuff. Perhaps if someone stole everything from me, I'd be even more free than I am now.
I don't believe you, but good for you if believe it yourself.
This would also have the positive side effect of making it really hard for public employees to engage in corrupt and illicit behavior (which, as we all know, is so rampant that it's practically industry standard at this point).
I think it would be helpful to understand your use case and how you balance your personal tolerance for risk and consequences so we can better consider users like yourself.
I primarily use it as a camera and tape recorder. And mobile wifi web browser with retina resolution in rare cases, all in which I specifically avoid using it to use any sites that require logging in.
I have a fake name on it. There are no contacts or email accounts set up on it.
It's not ever been activated as a cell phone.
Basically, I see no reason to have a password on it, and a password slows things down slightly and has the risk of forgetting (since I never reuse passwords), so why bother.
My Android phone that I do use as a cell phone though I have a password on it. It has similarly few personal details, but the call logs would make it easy to identify me.
Granted the iPhone's location logging though disabled might be storing info anyway, and probably the photos are GPS tagged, so those things would identify me.
If only I can find a smartphone for talk/text/web/GPS, I'd be switch in a heartbeat. I'm seriously getting sick of the all the security features that tend to bloat the device and slow it to a crawl.
That being said, if my phone was vulnerable to theft or I wasn't so careful, I would lock my screen.
I have an older phone that is basically a home remote for various things. There is no reason for it to lock, it would be annoying.
I am of an older tech generation who sees this type of security as antithetical to anonymity.
You don't need a passcode or facial recognition to access any phone that doesn't have those features enabled.
If you enable them you certainly do.
> I don't lock my phone at all. Never have. However, with the new iPhones that don't have a home button, I believe that Apple is forcing you to either use face unlock or a passcode. There is no choice to just leave it unlocked.
And I'm saying that you can use it without those features enabled; even on iPhones without a home button.
Also, while it might not be too difficult for someone to figure out my phone number and/or email address from my name, it's not like there's a public directory of either. "Not secret" does not should not equal "public".
I'm curious what affect not locking your phone might have on police reports if your identity/etc is ever stolen and you need to provide police reports. Possibly nothing, but I can imagine some credit cards legal team working hard on that aspect of things in the event you're trying to convince AMEX to return $40k of transactions you supposedly didn't make yourself and need reversed because your phone was swiped while logged into some CC app and they copied your card number.
That's what made him fine, not the fact that you didn't lock.
That's a thing that quite misunderstood, but for a crime to be committed, you need criminal intent. If you just made a mistake and weren't aware it wasn't your house, it's not a crime to enter it.
Also for some crimes the intent needn't match the outcome. For example in the UK _Attempted Murder_ requires (as well as facts of an attempt) you had an intent to kill, but _Murder_ only requires that you had an intent to at least cause grave harm, the fact of death makes it murder, even if a jury believes you intended only, say, to hospitalize the victim.
But that's also the thing- we had no idea what his intent was. I do recall the police that night seeming less concerned because the door was unlocked and I was chided quite a bit. I do recall them telling me what I said in my initial post but I also understand criminal intent. Personally I'm glad the guy wasn't wrung up with a felony if he was just on some ambien sleepwalk bender or whatever he was on.
That said, I have a really good friend that chooses not to use a passcode for their phone.
Somewhat irritating because being a really close friend we sometimes have very personal conversations via text, and the fact the they don’t lock their phone means I have to be conscious of that. These aren’t deep-dark secrets, but still personal things I wouldn’t share publicly.
So, as soon as my iPhone 6s stops working, I will have to choose to: 1) Give in and use my face to unlock. 2) Use a dumb passcode like 000000. 3) Upgrade to the newest iPhone that still has a home button (I think iPhone 8) or 4) Become and Android user.