Losing a phone is not about the phone
When you lose your phone, you lose a lot more than that. And some losses are not obvious. Here is a guide to prepare yourself to deal with such a loss.
- Ram Iyer
- 14 min read
Table of contents
Archana, a friend of mine, lost her phone around the end of the last year. Recently, she told me that she got her phone back. It was unbelievable. I had not imagined in my wildest dreams that our cops would actually find someone’s phone. My experience (my own and those of my family and friends) had been all about the cops admonishing us, the victims, for being careless enough to lose our phones. Of course, none of us has got our phones back.
She had made a post about it and the thoughts she describes—as dramatic as they may sound—is almost exactly what goes on in the mind of someone who’s lost their phone. I lost my first phone back in the noughties. I had just finished school or was at the end of the first year of college. It was a summer afternoon. We were in Diu, a tourist-heavy place in the summers. Roaming around the market, my friend asked me for the phone (he hadn’t brought his) so he could check if his father’s flight had landed. I gave it to him and almost forgot about it. We all did. He spoke to his father, and that’s the last we know of the phone. A couple of hours later (yes, that’s how [in]frequently we used to check our phones back then—besides, it was a keypad phone with basic GPRS; not much to do in it other than download tones and wallpapers, and use it as a modem to connect a computer via Bluetooth or USB to the Internet at dial-up speeds) I asked the friend for the phone, and he did not have it on him. Oh, the couple of days that followed were full of the “unpleasant emotions” on the emotion wheel.
Fast forward to the early 2010s, I lost another phone. This was out of my own carelessness, though. A passerby found it lying on the side of the road, and picked it up when we rang it to find out where it was. I know; sad, isn’t it? He promised to give it back to me, but ghosted me later. This time, I dealt with it—in my friend’s words—with a decent degree of grace and good humour.
Because this time, I only lost my phone.
You see, losing a phone is not merely about losing the piece of hardware. We lose a lot of our data along with that brick, as the post also points out.
My friend has an excellent Phone Loss Protocol, but while chatting with her, I told her there was a lot more to it, and that I would post it. So here I am, with what turned out to be a series.
When I read Archana’s post was when I got the non-techie perspective to losing a phone. I realised what she had done was nothing short of commendable. Whatever she’s said in the post is bang on point. Following those steps does minimise your loss to a great extent.
Although, in her case, she was smart, could think on her toes, and had a lot of variables working in her favour. You or I may not. For instance, I did not even think of St. Broseph. And other cities may not have a St. Broseph. So here is what a techie would do to their phone to protect the phone as well as the data.
Also, one thing I would perhaps change from the post is to say ‘paying for the right cloud’. So here is a slightly different take on what to do before you lose your phone, and with that, what to do if you lose your phone.
Value your hardware right
Let us start with the elephant in the room: The monetary loss you face when you lose your phone. Often, people calculate how much they paid for the phone, or what they would have to pay for the new phone, and they consider this their monetary setback. That is one way to look at it. But a more practical way of looking at it is how much your old phone was worth when you lost it. Let me explain.
When we lose our phone, most of us definitely aren’t anticipating the loss and preparing for a new one. But when you do buy a new phone, you look at trading in the old one (some of our online platforms like Amazon and Flipkart have this option). The value of your phone is more or less what is shown on these platforms as the trade-in value. You may get a better deal when selling it off yourself on, say, OLX or to offline phone buyers. It also depends on the condition of your phone and how the buyer interprets it. But what you see as the trade-in value on these online platforms is the ballpark monetary value of your hardware. I don’t know how this makes you feel, but this is how I look at it.
The second phone I lost was a Nokia 5233, which had set me back by ₹6,500 when I bought it. But by the time I had lost it a couple years later, Androids were ruling, and Nokia’s Symbian phones were almost obsolete by that time. I could have, at the very best, sold it at ₹1,800. This was about 10% of the cost of my next phone. So I moved on.
Prepare for Phone Loss
The key here is to anticipate losing your phone. In large cities, this is almost an inevitability. Thieves pick your phone anywhere: when boarding or alighting a bus, when waiting for your Uber, in the autorickshaw when replying to your work email, when checking directions … the list is long. Given the sheer number of opportunities thieves have, this is likely to happen to you one day or another. Whether a Stoic or not, anticipate losing your phone.
Also, if I lose my phone, I consider it gone. Not that I am a pessimist, but because I know how phones work, and how easily one can stop the phone from being tracked. When protecting my phone, I am protecting it from professional phone thieves, who know how to apply in the practical world, what I know only theoretically. (Electronics and Communication was my major in undergrad.) Therefore, they will always be a few steps ahead of people like you and me. This is also why I was surprised when my friend got her phone back. If you want to be untainted the way she was, stop reading this piece.
All is not gloom and doom, though. The trust deficit in the nature of an average Indian makes us different from the rest of the world, leading the government to build infrastructure around phone tracking and retrieval, which, while potentially enabling mass surveillance, can work in our favour at times. This also tells you how widespread the issue is; enough for the government to invest in this infrastructure.
My focus in this series is not going to be about the hardware, though I will touch upon it. I am going to focus on the data. You can buy another phone, get another SIM. But can you get back documents, memories, your journal entries, evidence of abuse and so on that you had stored on your phone?
A quick sidenote
Always carry some cash. Ensure you opt for a debit card for at least two of your bank accounts and keep one card at home. Optionally, have some cash on you (at least a couple hundred bucks—and don’t keep any of it in the back cover of your phone). This way, you can get home (or to a police station) in an auto or a bus if you lose your phone.
A little more to the IMEI number
Just to add one more point to the good advice that the post gives: If your phone has dual SIM capabilities, it will have two IMEI numbers. Write both of these down.
If you bought your phone online or from a good showroom, the bill is likely to have the IMEI number(s). If you threw away the carton, or were too lazy to write down the IMEI numbers, check your bill.
Set your phone to automatically lock
Duh, isn’t it?
I too thought so, until I saw that there were hundreds of online guides on configuring your phone to never automatically lock. That is saying something about how many people are looking to disable automatic lock on their phones.
Security and convenience have been on the opposite sides since time immemorial. If security of your data is your priority (hint: it should be), you must set your phone to automatically lock after a set period of time. You do not have to make it lock in 15 seconds, but at the same time, fifteen minutes is too far in the opposite direction. Set it to one minute to start with, and work your way up or down from there in small increments to see what interval works best for you.
The shorter the time is, the less likely someone is to pick it from your pocket or your coffee table unlocked. Locking your phone is more than what it seems, as you will learn in this series.
If possible, also make manually locking your phone a habit, so that you do it without even thinking.
What about emergencies
We have some of the elderly folk not locking their phone, thinking if they have a fall or some such incident when they are out and about, the good samaritans around can pick up the phone and call a relative.
You do not need keep your phone unlocked for this.
Every phone sold (at least in India) has emergency dialling enabled without unlocking. Pressing the “side button” (the one you use to lock/unlock your phone) thrice to five times in quick succession dials emergency. Depending on your phone features, you can set it to call a relative, or the default emergency number (112 in India). Here are the official guides to setting this up on iOS and Android.
If you don’t want to press the side button in quick succession or think the good samaritans might find it inconvenient, rest assured, they can always use your phone’s passcode input screen to dial emergency without unlocking your phone. The Emergency option appears quite prominently there.
But please do not disable screen locking just so that it helps you in an emergency. Emergency calls can be made without unlocking your phone, but it may not always be a good samaritan who picks up your phone.
Locking is not enough
Despite having a lock screen, your phone’s data can be accessed by mounting it as a regular storage device on the computer (as though it were a pen drive). Encrypting prevents the data from being read, making it unusable—none of the encrypted data will make sense to those who do not have the key. Here are the guides to doing this on iOS and Android. Note that this iOS article mentions “USB Accessories”, but in iOS 18.3.1 (the latest as of writing this piece), the toggle is called “Accessories”.
Also, remember that your SD card may not be encrypted (only some devices support SD card encryption, last I checked—go to Settings > Security to see what options you have). Be careful about what you store on your SD card. Generally, my recommendation is to not use an SD card at all. With at least 64 GB available on phones these days, you should not need an expansion card. We will cover what to do instead later in the series.
Disable notification preview when locked
Phones show notifications on the lock screens. You receive bank OTPs and what not via notifications. Keeping the notifications visible when locked is convenient when you want to quickly check something even with the phone locked, but is a major security risk that could lead to heavy losses. Set notification previews to show only when unlocked. Here are the guides to do that on iOS and Android. This is also critical for the next step.
Enable Self-destruct
This is optional, but you can configure your phone to delete all data in it if someone enters wrong credentials ten times in a row. Here is how to enable that on the iPhone. On Androids, I believe you must use an app to achieve this. But mostly, if you use strong credentials and have enabled encryption, you do not need to worry too much about this.
Hand grease is a giveaway
Passcodes are, by default, four or six digits long on the phones, which may be short enough to be a security risk. Using only numbers, that too, only six digits, makes your passcode vulnerable. When you have biometrics on your phone, you are not going to enter the passcode every time you unlock your phone. Might as well make the passcode secure. Here is how you can do it on iOS and Android.
Please do not use screen lock patterns. They are highly insecure. Your phone’s pattern can be guessed thanks to your hand grease on your phone screen. And there is a whole set of common patterns that people use. Biometrics are the norm these days for good reason. Use them along with strong, alphanumeric passcodes/passwords.
Remember that your screen lock protects your finances: many apps like PhonePe, BHIM, bank apps, etc. use your screen lock as authentication rather than ask you for their password (except, of course, for your first sign-in). Your screen lock is protecting your hard-earned money. Give it the attention it deserves.
Do not capture or store n*des on the phone
I cannot stress the importance of this. If you have NSFW pictures of you and/or your partner(s) on your phone, delete them now, clear the trash/bin and don’t capture any more of them on the phone. Do not store them on the phone (or worse, an expansion card) either. Your phone is not the device for that. If possible, abstain from shooting such pictures and videos altogether.
The experience of the pictures and videos getting out will be nothing like Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video. The film makers deliberately set the story in 1997 because something like that leaking today is a guaranteed disaster; they did not know how to handle the story if they set it in even 2005. Nobody does, because the Internet never forgets. Such leaked videos from the noughties are still very much available online. And they will be available even after the victims live their whole lives and pass.
Delete transactional messages
You do not want your phone thief to know or gauge your financial status. Delete transactional messages from time to time. All this information is available on your bank account (and card) statements anyway, and getting them online, on demand, is free.
A note on Encryption
Encryption is the act of scrambling the data in such a way that it would not make sense to anyone other than to whom it should. There are many ways to achieve this, and a discussion on them would become a bit too technical for most people (including me). The good part is, we don’t have to worry about it; our phone OS makers have taken care of it for us.
In essence, when someone steals your phone and somehow manages to connect it to a computer to read the data, they would be met with stuff that will make no sense whatsoever. The files will not be as they should be, they will not be readable to begin with and so on. This way, without your credentials (password, for example), nobody would be able to read your data.
Your phone will still function normally for as long as it is unlocked, because unlocking your phone automatically decrypts your data. The moment it gets locked, the data will be scrambled again. It sounds like magic, but it is just mathematics working quietly behind the scenes. Our phones of today are capable of handling this for us so well, that we can take it for granted. And this encryption and decryption happen at lightning speeds; so fast that even before you realise the data has to be decrypted, it is already decrypted. The process is absolutely seamless and has been error-free in so many years of my using the feature.
But that is not all
This is only the first article in a four-article series. Here are all the articles in the series: