Recently I had a mobile device stolen – a phone. It was a ZTE Avid 4G smartphone running Android. I love this model phone because it is good enough to run Android and all the things I need or want: a web browser (Dolphin), mail client (K9 mail), contacts management (Contacts+ synced with my personal CardDAV server using CardDAV-sync), music player (PowerAmp), calendar (synced with my personal CalDAV server using CalDAV-sync), plus other things. Another major benefit of the phone is that its inexpensive. Carrying around a device that costs several hundreds of dollars, which one has to continually worry about, is a major pain in the ass. I love inexpensive things that are still very functional and can be easily replaced.
Password Security
The Dolphin web browser has a Lastpass plugin (So in fact does the Firefox browser. Chrome also has an extension for it.) I choose to have all passwords stored in Lastpass and only Lastpass. That means that no passwords are stored using the browser’s own password-storing feature. Only Lastpass.
After my phone was stolen the first thing I did was change my Lastpass master password and went into my account settings and deleted the phone from the device list. That means that, even though the thief had my browser, they could not log on to any of my sites.
Another major reason to use Lastpass is because we are always finding out about how one company or another has had its user/password lists stolen by thieves. There are so many sites that people register on that it would be practically impossible to use unique passwords for each of them. But using the same or even similar passwords for many sites is a terrible idea.
When registering for a site Lastpass can generate a secure password and then store it. Whenever the site is visited on any of the user’s devices – phone, tablet, laptop, etc. – it will offer to automatically fill in the log in info. This autofill feature works almost all the time. Sometimes with certain sites because of poor design it will not ask to autofill. But one can still easily copy the username and password via the Lastpass menu and enter them by copy-paste.
Security is not perfect, but it is improving a lot. Its highly disappointing that the major phone carriers are basically doing very little to properly deal with theft of their customers’ devices. Another major reason why they should be forced to just sell pure bandwidth and let user’s select their own hardware and operating systems to run over it.
When it comes to their own scamming and gouging customers to make profit there’s no end to their “innovation” and activity. But when it comes to actually caring about customer’s and doing things to protect them, they do nothing or else they see it as another chance to gouge and extract more fees.
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