Mark in Show Low, Arizona listens on News, Traffic Weather – KDWN 970 asked:
“I wonder why people are so willing to use Smartphones if they are so easy to hack. I’m using an older generation flip phone, digital not analog. I feel it’s a little more secure than the smartphones. Can someone let me know about the smartphone? I would think the older phone is more secure than the smartphone. Is that correct?”
An older phone isn’t really more secure than a smartphone, it just does less, so there are less things to try to get from it.
What’s your concern?
If you’re worried about your conversations being overheard, or your texts read then at best you’re as vulnerable as smartphone users, you may actually be more so, if your phone is so old as to use an older encryption standard.
If anyone gets a hold of your smartphone and manages to unlock it, they will probably have access to more information, since a smartphone has access to email accounts, and other apps, though some like banking apps will have their own passwords.
Having said that, if smartphones were insecure they probably wouldn’t be the standard at every industry around the world these days.
Smartphones get a little riskier when they are rooted or jailbroken, that process removes a lot of the protections built into the operating system and allow rogue software to collect data that it would otherwise not have access to. Having said that, that is not something that happens on it’s own, depending on the phone the process may be simpler or more involved, but it takes actually trying to do it.
So, your flip phone may be safer from the perspective that it stores less information so there is less to steal, but as far as making whatever you have on it less safe, that’s probably not the case.
Smartphones allow for longer passcodes too, and passphrases, and patterns, and biometric scans, just in terms of how they secure the data, they have more solid security features.