My iPhone -- known around these parts as "my precious baby iPhone" -- was stolen last night.
It was taken right out of my hands. A block and a half away from my apartment, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to select a different song on Spotify, and a man on a bicycle came speeding by and snatched it from my grip. He was gone in a flash, and I was left with just the bottom piece of my purple iPhone cover in my hands.
To be sure, I've heard many stories and warnings lately about various iDevices being stolen. In New York City, we are regularly reminded to keep our iPhones and iPads concealed on the subways; and I've been extra careful there. I never expected someone to fly by on the street and take it from my hands.
Needless to say, I have learned my lesson.
I learned a couple of lessons, actually, because -- despite my being the editor of this very tech-aware Website -- I hadn't at all taken the kind of precautions an Internet Evolved person would. In fact, the detective at my neighborhood police precinct looked at me, astonished, as he said: "You write about technology for a living... and you didn't have 'Find My iPhone' enabled?"
No, officer, I didn't have Find My iPhone enabled. Nor was I even connected to iCloud. Nor was my device set up so that several entries of the wrong passcode would delete all my data.
Nor did I even have my iPhone backed up properly, as I discovered this morning, when my friend and I plugged in my new iPhone 4S (yes, Alan Reiter, I got the 4S!), and discovered I had one (1!) contact backed up to my Address Book on my Mac. One. And it's someone I don't even talk to anymore. #Winning!
We spend a lot of time on this site debating the merits and drawbacks of location awareness, the safety of the cloud, and the potential dangers of iCloud, specifically. I often find myself sitting on the skeptical side of the fence. But last night I wanted to kick myself for not having every tracking service I could think of enabled, and for not having all of my data available and waiting for me in the cloud.
And I felt rather foolish when everyone and their mother (well, except my mother, who mostly just got weepy about all the bad things that could have happened to me) asked me if I'd searched for my device with Find My iPhone, which would have been amazingly useful. To enable this feature, iPhone (and iPad) users need only download the Find My iPhone app, and then turn the service on in iCloud. Once this is set up, users can locate their iDevices on a map, play a sound on the lost or stolen device, remotely lock it, and remotely wipe it and erase personal data. For me, the ability to do all of those things would have been very comforting.
Overall, I was one of the more fortunate victims of iThievery. This wasn't armed robbery. I wasn't harmed. But I could have made things much easier for myself by taking advantage of the technology available. After the iPhone was taken from my hands, my mind immediately jumped to all of the photos, videos, audio albums, notes, and correspondences I'd stored on there; as well as the various services I was logged onto. (I used my sleepless night to change usernames and passwords on every account I could possibly think of.)
The bottom line is this: We might refer to these things as smartphones, but they're way more than that. They're data repositories and lifelines in many ways, and they should be treated and protected as such.
This might bring some light. It's fairly common all over the World, the issue is sharing those databases among different carriers and different countries.
Susan,
I don't use iCloud. Mainly because of the personal info that Apple gathers from a default iOS device without the cloud. I'm paranoid about that sort of thing and I don't trust them to give away storage space, without them trying to conjur up a scheme to pay for it. And more and more, we are finding these cloud vendors are selling info about what their customers are doing after they leave. iCloud is too big am unknown as to what and how they plan to pay to store all that data. So I'm out on that one.
-Kurt
Good point Susan. It's, however, the hardest thing for me to do. I'm contemplating it, as the ability to shut the phone down and delete it's contents do not require iCloud to function, I'm not sure I want to stand face to face with the thief who lifted my phone.
Susan, I suppose the iDevices are perceived to be the most valuable and desirable. I just read this in the LA Times from December: "nearly half the 16,000 robberies in the first 10 months of 2011 [in New York] involved technological devices... iPhones account for over 70% of all stolen cellphones on subways and buses."
I just have to share that when I got off the subway last night in my neighborhood there were police officers standing around, handing out flyers warning people to be careful to not have their "Apples snatched" -- i.e., their iDevices.
I, of course, want to credit myself entirely with this movement. More likely, though, my iTheft was just one of many to happen lately.
Thanks for your (personal) sympathy, Jerry! In this case, it was my personal iPhone. Had it been an IT-supported company iPhone, that would have been particularly bad but that means it also would have been equipped with the security features my phone was lacking (remote wipe and so on). So while I would never want to lose my company phone, having the support of IT would have been comforting.
I will try to find a picture of the Baby. All that's left of her is the bottom half of the purple case she was covered in. Sniff.
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