How to keep your phone secure and do not let your girlfriend snoop on it

by Mark on 15th June 2021

Our smartphones have turned into the spine of our online existence. While we are busy protecting them from spyware and malware, we forget that danger sometimes lurks within our most intimate circle: girlfriends. It wouldn’t be too wrong to say that women have been genetically endowed with curiosity, intuitiveness, and masterly crafted prying abilities. And it wouldn’t be too wrong either to say that males often underestimate these perfected skills, thus turning into easy prey.

The purpose of this article is not to analyse how snooping can affect your relationship. Instead, we will start from the premise that you already know that your angelic girlfriend is actually a digital hunter. If you want to keep your private information … private, prevention is the best strategy.

The most common ways to protect your data

Keep your smartphone handy

Drama starts where logic ends. If you keep your phone handy, no one will be able to access it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which keeping your phone handy is not possible. So keep reading for extra security advice.

Keep your phone locked

Use passwords, PINs, and patterns to lock your phone. But, whatever you do, don’t use your or her birthday or your anniversary! Dedicate some effort to choose a password that is difficult to guess. It is also crucial to choose the shortest possible amount of time before your phone locks when idle.  However, keep in mind that experts consider patterns to be the least safe for a simple reason: graphical patterns are easier to memorise if compared to memorising random numbers.

Disable screen notifications

The notification screen can turn into your worst enemy in a matter of seconds. It suffices with your device to alert you that there is a new social media message requiring your attention. To play safe, make sure to access the notification settings and make the safest bet: show no notifications.

Limit access to your smartphone

If there is an app you don’t want anyone else to access, you can put accessibility limits. If you own an iPhone, you need to enter Guided Access and restrict access to the desired app. On Android, you need to turn on Screen pinning.

Create password-protected folders to keep sensitive data safe

If locking your smartphone sounds like too much work but you still want to keep data private, you can create special folders that you can protect with passwords

Innovative data protection solutions

Fortunately, PINs, passwords, and patterns are no longer the only available solutions. Nowadays, most smartphone manufacturers have added anti-prying biometric security features. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Fingerprint

At first sight, fingerprint scanning sounds like a good strategy to protect your phone and it is used to unlock devices and as an authentication method for certain smartphone features such as payments. While it may work with strangers, taking a nap with your girlfriend by your side doesn’t sound all that safe after all.

Facial recognition

Let’s begin by highlighting that experts don’t consider this feature safe enough for it to be used as payment authentication. With that being said, we would dare to say it is not girlfriend-proof either.

Iris scanning

Even if this feature is used for unlocking and payment authentication alike, there aren’t many smartphones that use it. However, it is considered the safest biometric security feature.

Voice Detection

We are talking about a convenient – and difficult to simulate - security option that uses Voice Match and Google Assistant to unlock the device.

To sum up

While it is true that no security feature is 100% guaranteed, using all the available methods to enhance your smartphone’s security will make it difficult for intruders – girlfriends or strangers - to violate your private space.