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Senior Online Safety - Kill Switch - Kill my data
Photo: jacinta lluch valero via Compfight

Kill my data?

Whether you decide to trade in your smartphone on a newer model, throw it away, donate it to a charity or give your phone to your son, daughter or one of your grandchildren, you need to remove all of your personal data before doing so to make your phone a “brick,” a piece of plastic, glass and/or metal that is essentially useless to someone interested in mining the data from the device.

Just as your body needs to be cleansed inside and out to stay healthy, your personal data must be cleansed from your smartphone when disposing of it to ensure that your data stays healthy and your data. When your personal data is healthy, it is only accessed and used by you, but when your personal data is unhealthy, it is being accessed and used by someone else in malicious ways against you.

How do you I kill my data?

Wipe data from your iPhone: Log into your “Find my iPhone” account on your computer or tablet and open the app. Click the “erase” button. A warning message will pop up asking if you are sure you want to do this. Click the box that states you understand what you’re doing, then click the “erase” button again johncatral via Compfight. This will delete all of your data, preventing others from accessing it. And it works remotely as well, so if you phone is not in your possession (i.e. lost or stolen) you can zap the data.

Wipe data from your Android: Go to the Android Device Manager website. Click on your device. Then click the “wipe all data” button to delete all of your data.

But what if you lose your smartphone?

We previously wrote on “How to find your lost smartphone” which will help you locate it. If you can’t or don’t wish to recover it, if you are an iPhone or iPad user Apple has a kill-switch built into their iOS7, as discussed above, as of this writing, there is no equivalent available for Android devices.

Interestingly, on May 14, 2014, the Governor of Minnesota signed the first “kill switch” bill into law, making it illegal to sell a smartphone in this state after July 1, 2015 without a preinstalled kill switch. A kill switch is a piece of software that allows smartphone owners to remotely disable and wipe data from their phones if they feel their phone has been stolen or if they forget to do so before disposing of it.

California is following suit, although a bit slower than Minnesota. The California Senate Approves Smartphone Kill Switch (New York Times) bill that was rejected at the end of April, adding a six month extension for compliance and noting that tablets are not included. It’s now up to the state Assembly to approve the bill.

The thought behind the kill switch laws is that by disabling and wiping the data from the smartphone, you are taking away their worth, rendering them a useless brick. Therefore, there is no incentive for thieves to steal them.

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