Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech

Version 1.1, updated November 26, 2024

The digital and “real” worlds can both be scary places. The smartphone (and often smartwatch) you already carry with you can help reduce risks, deter theft, and mitigate violence. This book teaches you to secure your hardware, block abuse, automatically call emergency services, connect with others to ensure you arrive where and when you intended, detect stalking by compact trackers, and keep your ecosystem accounts from Apple, Google, and Microsoft secure.n You don’t have to be reminded of the virtual and physical risks you face every day. Some of us are targeted more than others. Modern digital features built into mobile operating systems (and some computer operating systems) can help reduce our anxiety by putting more power in our hands to deter, deflect, block, and respond to abuse, threats, and emergencies.

Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech looks at both digital threats, like online abuse and account hijacking, and ones in the physical world, like being stalked through Bluetooth trackers, facing domestic violence, or being in a car crash. The book principally covers the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Android devices, but doesn’t ignore Wear OS watches, the iPad, and computers running macOS or Windows.

This book explores many techniques to help:

• Learn how to harden your Apple ID/Apple Account, Google Account, and Microsoft Account beyond just a password or a text-message token.

• Discover blocking tools in operating systems and third-party apps that can prevent abusive, fraudulent, and phishing messages and calls from reaching you.

• Block seeing unwanted sensitive images on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch—and help your kids receive advice on how not to send them.

• Turn on tracking on your devices, and use it to recover or erase stolen hardware.

• Keep your cloud-archived messages from leaking to attackers.

• Lock down your devices to keep thieves and other personal invaders from accessing them.

• Prepare for emergencies by setting up medical information on your mobile devices.

• Let a supported smartphone or smartwatch recognize when you’re in a car crash or have taken a hard fall and call emergency services for you (and text your emergency contacts) if you can’t respond.

• Keep track of heart anomalies through smartwatch alerts and tests.

• Tell others where or when you expect to check in with them again, and let your smartphone alert them if you don’t.

• Deter stalking from tiny Bluetooth trackers.

• Protect your devices and accounts against access from domestic assailants.

• Block thieves who steal your phone—potentially threatening you or attacking you in person—from gaining access to the rest of your digital life.