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Never give a cop your phone and other security tips

The Silicon Underground –  “The political climate in the United States means everyone, but especially marginalized groups, need to be thinking about phone security. It’s not just something security professionals and people who handle sensitive information for a living need to worry about anymore. In light of that, I present five phone security tips I wish everyone knew and followed. Keep your phone up to date is security tip number one. Your whole life is on this phone. If a cop wants to see it, make them get a search warrant. Let’s start with the basics. Your phone wants to apply security updates periodically. Apple phones get updates on an irregular basis. Android phones get them every month. Regardless of which one you have, you need to be applying updates. Apple marketing claims they have the best security and privacy in the industry. Apple fans will drag me for this, but someone needs to say it. If you are paying a premium for Apple and not applying updates, you aren’t getting what you pay for. If your device isn’t up to date, it’s not secure. And that’s all there is to it. An up to date Android is more secure than an out of date iPhone.We all have that one retired IT guy we’re connected to on social media who says not to update your devices because you might break something. Don’t listen to him. People like that are also the reason that five companies I do business with got breached in the last 12 months. I remember the last time a security update broke something for me like it was yesterday. But it happened in 2006. Updates do sometimes break things, but it’s rare. In the event a system update does break something, more often than not, a later system update or an update to the app will fix it. Especially if it is a popular app. As much of your life as you keep on your phone, it’s not worth the security risk just because of the low possibility next month’s update might break Flappy Bird…”

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