In some places, phone thefts have surged so much it's now an everyday problem, with thieves on electric bikes snatching them out of pedestrians' hands, swiping them off restaurant tables or pickpocketing them on the subway.
In Britain, where 200 phones are stolen every day in "snatch thefts," the government has pledged to crack down on the crime and is meeting with tech companies and device makers to come up with solutions.
Here are steps you can take before and after your phone goes missing:
BASIC PROTECTIONS
There are things you can do to make it less painful if your phone is stolen. Because some of these features are more technical in nature, people often overlook them.
Lock down as much as you can. At a minimum, require a password or biometric scan to unlock the device. You can also add similar requirements to important individual apps — like your banking account, WhatsApp or Signal — to protect your finance or chats from thieves.
Also, activate the find my device feature, which is available for both iOS and Android. Samsung also offers its own service called SmartThings Find.
You’ll probably have lots of precious photos saved on your camera roll. It’s a good idea to back them up, along with contacts, calendar items and other files. Google and Apple offer cloud-based backup services, although the free versions have limited storage space. You can also back up your files to an external hard drive, memory card or a laptop.
Some police forces and phone companies advise turning off message previews, which prevents thieves trying to break into your accounts from seeing reset or login codes when the phone is locked. To do this on an iPhone, for example, go to the Notifications section of your settings menu and tap Show Previews. You can also scroll down the app list to turn previews off for individual apps but leave them on for less risky ones like news or weather.
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