We live in the era of data leaks and crooks.
Last year, crooks stole $ 2 billion with Australians (against the peak of all time of $ 3.1 billion in 2022). This year, crooks have obtained significant data on millions of people from the violation of Qantas data, and even more sensitive personal and medical data from the genea data violation.
It is therefore important that people know and fully benefit from the confidentiality and security parameters on their devices. To help this, Apple recently announced a great feature that has the potential to make a huge difference.
This is called calls screening, and the way it works is that when you receive a call from an unregistered number in your contacts, the iPhone asks the appellant of his name and the reason for their call, which is then transcribed and sent.
You can then ask them more questions using a text interface, hang up or you can take the call. What is great is that if the crook at the other end of the line hangs up, you are never even informed of their call.
It has the potential to be embarrassing if you never stop saving people’s numbers on your phone. But you can deactivate the feature if it does not meet your needs.
For Android users that it seems familiar, the call screen is available on certain Android phones (such as Google Pixel 9A) via Google’s telephone application for about a year.
If you are on Android and you do not use it already, you can find it in the phone> Settings> Call screen, then decide the level of protection you want.
For iPhone users, this feature arrives in the launch of iOS26 in September. It will of course be available on the new iPhone 17 range, but also all 2019 and more recent iPhones (therefore, the iPhone 11 range and the 2nd generation SE and more recent).
However, there are many iPhone confidentiality and safety features that you should use at the moment on your current device running iOS 18.
The main thing is the Password application. It is a password manager that can record your passwords and automatically on websites and applications, so you never have to remember your password.
Even better, it can also suggest solid passwords, so that you do not reuse 1234567 eight! on each website.
If one of your user names or passwords appear on a data violation, the application will inform you and help you modify your contact details on the website in question. It is simple, effective and makes most of the work for you, which is always the best type of safety functionality.
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If you are concerned about someone who may have access to your phone (or watch your screen over your shoulder) able to see applications that you have installed, such as a job search ad at work, or Abuse support applicationsThere is a way to hide this.
Simply select the application you want to hide by touching and holding the application icon until the quick actions menu appears, and press the front ID requires, then authenticate the use of the front ID.
Then he will be sent to Hidden applications file on the home screen. The Hidden Apps folder is present on each iPhone, even those who do not have hidden applications, so it will not be easy that you have hidden something.
The protection of stolen devices is another important feature to add if you worry about thieves (or other bad players) who may have observed you using your password. You can know more about it here.
This feature means that if your phone is far from your usual places (such as the house or the work), it requires a face ID (or a contact identifier), without any option to use your password as an alternative. It also adds a safety time to change the password of your account or other key activities like this, giving you more time to mark your device as lost and brick, which makes thieves incapable of entering your banking applications or other critical applications.
The protection of stolen devices can be activated by going to the parameters> Face ID and access code> Stolen device protection, then activate or deactivate it. You can know more here.
My favorite security function is Hide my emailWho creates random unique email addresses to give to applications and websites that force you to have an account.
These email addresses are not connected to you and, in case your data is stolen or sold from this website, it allows you to easily remove the socket without putting your real email in danger.
This option automatically appears on safari on most sites and in certain applications, but you must have an iCloud subscription to operate (from $ 1.49 per month).
The last and most important thing to do with regard to the safety of devices is to keep the operating system up to date. It’s simple, it’s boring and it works. The problem with crooks and thieves is that you have to be constantly lucky and vigilant against intrusion, and they just have a chance once.
Thus, the use of all the tools available to protect you is essential, especially when they work in the background and do the bulk of the work for you.
