At some point over the past ten years, mobile phones have taken on so many of the functions of our lives that they’ve become almost like our digital personal assistants. We might have Amazon’s Alexa, or a Google Dot in the corner of our homes, but it’s likely to be Siri who does all the heavy work for us. Even if you have an Android phone and don’t have access to Apple’s cheery voice-activated helper, we imagine you currently rely on your mobile phone a lot more right now than you did a decade ago.
Consider all the things that phones have adapted to do during that time. Once upon a time, we talked about online banking, and we had to go to a computer to check our emails. We had to do the same to check our social media accounts too, and do our shopping. Now, all of that happens through our phones – often at the touch of a single button. Sometimes no buttons are necessary – our phones are so smart they’ll simply notify us when something requires our attention.
Technology may have come a long way in a comparatively short space of time – but our security measures may not have done. Barely a day goes by without a story in the news about a worrying security flaw in an app we use every day, and the consequences of a hack could be devastating. With our lives so ‘plugged in’ to our phones, everything from our private pictures to our financial details could be in the hands of hackers in mere moments without the proper protection in place.
Fortunately, there are several apps you can install on your phone to protect yourself from harm, and they don’t cost you a dime! Here are our preferred security picks from the current range of options:-
- Avast Mobile Security
You should know the name of Avast – it’s the most widely used antivirus software for laptop and desktop computers in the world. Everything it can do for your computer, it can also do for your phone! Although your phone should have come with its own antivirus software, it likely pales in comparison to the thoroughness and effectiveness of Avast. We’d recommend downloading it and installing it as a replacement for whatever you’re currently running. According to its own promotional material in the app store, the Avast app can detect 99.9% of all known malware, and alert you before malware is installed on your phone. Simply put, Avast stops problems before they happen, and alerts you if you’re about to make a mistake that could compromise your information.
- AppLock
This app is more about protecting your phone from people trying to physically access it than people trying to access it remotely, but we all know that phones get lost or left behind. If your unlocked phone is stolen from you, a thief now has instant access to every single app you have installed on it – unless you’ve been smart enough to install AppLock. The premise of AppLock is straightforward, but very effective. Rather than one passcode or fingerprint providing access to the entire contents of your phone, with AppLock you can individually lock sensitive apps, folders, and other information. You can even specify different passcodes for different apps – although you’re then tasked with remembering them yourself! AppLock renders a stolen phone almost useless if used correctly. It’s still upsetting to lose your device – but at least you know your data is secure.
- LastPass
Passwords: They’re our human vulnerability. All of our fingerprint ID systems, anti-malware programs, and locked apps are no good to us if our passwords are either clearly guessable, clearly visible, or left in a place that someone can find them. That’s where LastPass comes in. We sometimes get things backward with passwords; we pay close attention to a password we need for online banking, but we’ll use something easier to guess for a site related to a hobby or interest. Consider something as innocuous as a online slots website for a moment. Playing online slots is a popular hobby, and millions of people around the world indulge in it. Because players like to be able to pay in and withdraw money from their online slots accounts easily, their bank account details might be connected to their preferred mobile slots website, yet the password they’ll use for it probably isn’t as strong as the password they use for mobile banking. That makes their mobile slots account a potential gateway for someone to access their bank details. LastPass averts that risk by encrypting all of your passwords, and then storing them centrally. The only person getting into any of your accounts is you.
- App Opps
Apps are both our best friends and our worst enemies. Apps make our phones a lot easier to use, and they’re very convenient. They can also be a liability, however. All of your hard work in securing your phone could be easily undone if an app suffers a hacking attack, and all the data held by or transmitted to that app is compromised. We’ve seen in the news recently that the photo manipulation app FaceApp has been accused of having unfavorable terms and conditions when it comes to data privacy, so some apps may already have too much access to your data without even being hacked! The problem users face is that apps often ask for more access to your device and data than you want to give them, but they won’t install if you refuse those permissions. App Opps is how you regain control of the situation. You can grant an app every permission it wants, and then once it’s installed, you use App Opps to revoke any permissions you don’t want it to have. Typical examples would be apps that want access to your camera when they don’t have any photo features, or apps that want access to your location data despite not being location-specific. If you want to shut an app out of an area that it shouldn’t be looking, App Opp can do that without stopping the app from working. That means even if they are hacked, the data you want to be kept safe should remain safe!