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Chris shared some tech milestones from this week in years past
Listener Mark in Show Low, Arizona asked about the safety of smartphones
He said: “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.
What you really need to do is avoid getting apps from anywhere except the official app store for your brand of smartphone. The apps there have been submitted to scrutiny and testing before they were posted.
If you do that and you avoid the urge to jailbreak or root your phone, you really ought to be okay with a smartphone. And, even if it’s still possible for something bad to happen, the unbelievable array of things your smartphone can do is worth the risk.