Smartphones are essential tools today, but what happens after you lose your phone?

The security risk of lost smartphones

Researchers at Symantec found out that 96 percent of people who find a lost smartphone attempted to access personal or business data stored on the device. The study also found out that 45 percent of people who found a lost smartphone tried to access the corporate e-mail client on the device. This is certainly scary news. Naturally, smartphones are designed to be tiny. It is easy to misplace them.

Human nature and smartphone tech

The Symantec study was in essence studying human nature. 50 smartphones were left in large cities in North America; namely New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Ottawa. Lots of files the phones contained were fake and had enticing labels like “online banking” and “saved passwords”.

According to the study results, 72 percent of people who found a phone attempted to access photos, 57 percent made an effort to open a file named “saved passwords,” and 43 percent tried to open the “online banking” app. This will concern whoever has the habit of losing their phone.

Protecting your smartphone

Fortunately there are several steps people could take to safeguard themselves if and when they lose their smartphones.

The easiest way to secure the data on your smartphone is to generate a secure password. It might seem obvious, but you would be astonished at how many people don’t password protect their phones. There are many apps that securely lock specific apps or files. A less obvious option is to subscribe to a service that lets you remotely wipe your smartphones memory. Regardless of which method you use, it’s crucial that you take some method of securing your smartphone in case of loss or theft.