Protecting Your iPhone
These days, an iPhone is much more than just a phone. You use it to surf the web, send and receive e-mail and text messages, manage your contacts and schedules, find your way in the world, and much more. This is handy, for sure, but it also means that your iPhone is jammed with tons of information about you. Even though you might not store the nuclear launch codes on your iPhone, chances are what is on it is pretty important to you. Considering all this, you should take steps to protect your iPhone, and that's what the next few sections are all about.
Locking your iPhone with a passcode
When your iPhone is asleep, the phone is locked in the sense that tapping the touchscreen or pressing the volume controls does nothing. This sensible arrangement prevents accidental taps when the phone is in your pocket, or rattling around in your backpack or handbag. To unlock the phone, you either press the Home button or the Sleep/Wake button, drag the Slide to Unlock slider, and you're back in business.
Unfortunately, this simple technique means that anyone else who gets his or her mitts on your iPhone can also be quickly back in business - your business! If you have sensitive or confidential information on your phone, or if you want to avoid digital joyrides that run up massive roaming or data charges, you need to truly lock your iPhone.
You do that by specifying a passcode that must be entered before anyone can use the iPhone. You can either set a simple four-digit passcode, or you can set one that is longer and more complex, using any combination of numbers, letters, and symbols. Follow these steps to set up your passcode:
- On the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings app appears.
- Tap General. The General screen appears.
- If you prefer to set a complex passcode, tap the Simple Passcode switch to Off.
- Tap Turn Passcode On. The Set Passcode screen appears.
- Tap your passcode. For security, the characters appear in the passcode box as dots.
- If you're entering a complex passcode, tap Next. Your iPhone prompts you to reenter the passcode.
- Tap your passcode again.
- If you're entering a complex passcode, tap Done.
With your passcode now active, iPhone displays the Passcode Lock screen. You can also get to this screen by tapping Settings in the Home screen, then General, and then Passcode Lock.
You really, really need to remember your iPhone passcode. If you forget it, you're locked out of your own phone. The only way to get back in is to use iTunes to restore the data and settings to your iPhone from an existing backup.
This screen offers eight settings:
- Turn Passcode Off: If you want to stop using your passcode, tap this button and then enter the passcode. This is for security (otherwise an interloper could just shut off the passcode).
- Change Passcode: Tap this button to enter a new passcode. Note that you must first enter your old passcode before you can enter the new one.
- Require Passcode: This setting determines how much time elapses before the iPhone locks the phone and requests the passcode. The default setting is Immediately, which means you see the Enter Passcode screen as soon as you finish dragging Slide to Unlock. The other options are After 1 minute, After 5 minutes, After 15 minutes, After 1 hour, and After 4 hours. Use one of the latter if you want to be able to work with your iPhone for a bit before getting locked out. For example, the After 1 minute option is good if you want to quickly check e-mail without having to enter your passcode.
- Simple passcode: Use this switch to toggle between a simple four-digit passcode and a complex passcode.
- Siri: When this setting is On, you can use Siri to dial calls, search the web, and perform other voice-related tasks, even when your iPhone is locked. If you change this setting to Off, you can no longer use Siri when your iPhone is locked.
- Passbook: When this setting is On, you can access the cards, coupons, and passes that you have stored in the Passbook app.
- Reply with Message: When this setting is On, you can access the Reply with Message feature in the Lock screen, which enables you to reply to an incoming phone call with a message instead of answering the call.
- Erase Data: When this setting is On, your iPhone will self-destruct - er - I mean erase all its data when it detects ten incorrect passcode attempts. Ten failed passcodes almost always means that some nasty person has your phone and is trying to guess the passcode. If you have sensitive or private data on your phone, setting it to erase automatically is a good idea.
With the passcode activated, when you bring the iPhone out of standby, you drag the Slide to Unlock slider as usual, and then the Enter Passcode screen appears. Type your passcode (and tap OK if it's a complex passcode) to unlock the iPhone.
If an emergency arises and you need to make a call for help, you probably don't want to mess around with entering a passcode. Similarly, if something happens to you, another person who doesn't know your passcode may need to use your iPhone to call for assistance. In both cases, you can temporarily bypass the passcode by tapping the Emergency Call button on the Enter Passcode screen.
Configuring your iPhone to sleep automatically
You can put your iPhone into standby mode at any time by pressing the Sleep/Wake button once. This drops the power consumption considerably (mostly because it shuts off the screen), but you can still receive incoming calls and text messages, and if you have the Music app running, it continues to play.
However, if your iPhone is on but you're not using it, it automatically goes into standby mode after 2 minutes. This is called Auto-Lock and it's a handy feature because it saves battery power (and prevents accidental taps) when your iPhone is just sitting there. It's also a crucial feature if you've protected your iPhone with a passcode lock, as describe earlier, because if your iPhone never sleeps, it never locks, either.
To make sure your iPhone sleeps automatically, or if you're uncomfortable with the default 2-minute Auto-Lock interval, you can make it shorter or longer (or turn it off altogether). Here are the steps to follow:
- On the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings app appears.
- Tap General. The General screen appears.
- Tap Auto-Lock. The Auto-Lock screen appears.
- Tap the interval you want to use. You have six choices: 1 Minute, 2 Minutes, 3 Minutes, 4 Minutes, 5 Minutes, or Never.
Backing up your iPhone
When you sync your iPhone with your computer, iTunes automatically creates a backup of your current iPhone data before performing the sync. Note, however, that iTunes doesn't back up your entire iPhone, which makes sense because most of what's on your phone - music, photos, videos, apps, and so on - is already on your computer. Instead, iTunes only backs up data unique to the iPhone, including your call history, text messages, web clips, network settings, app settings and data, and Safari history and cookies.
However, what if you've configured iTunes not to sync your iPhone automatically? Is there a way to back up your iPhone without performing a sync? You bet there is.
- Connect your iPhone to your computer.
- Open iTunes, if it doesn't launch automatically.
- In the Devices section, right-click your iPhone and then click Back Up. iTunes backs up the iPhone data.
If you have an iCloud account, you can also control where your iPhone gets backed up: to your computer or to iCloud. To configure this, connect your iPhone to your computer and then click your iPhone when it appears in the iTunes Devices list. In the Summary tab's Backup section, select either the Back up to iCloud option or the Back up to this computer option.
You can then follow these steps to back up your data to iCloud directly from your iPhone:
- Connect your iPhone to a power source and to a Wi-Fi network. iPhone-to-iCloud backups don't work if your iPhone is running on batteries or is using a cellular network connection.
- Tap Settings to launch the Settings app.
- Tap iCloud.
- Tap Storage & Backup.
- Check that the iCloud Backup switch is On. If not, tap the switch to On and then tap OK when iCloud confirms the setting.
- Tap Back Up Now. Your iPhone backs up its data to your iCloud account.
Configuring parental controls
If your children have access to your iPhone, or if they have iPhones of their own, then you might be a bit worried about some of the content they might be exposed to on the web, on YouTube, or in iTunes. Similarly, you might not want them installing apps or giving away their current location.
For all those and similar parental worries, you can sleep better at night by activating the parental controls on your iPhone. These controls restrict the content and activities that kids can see and do. Here's how to set them up:
- On the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings app appears.
- Tap General. The General screen appears.
- Tap Restrictions. The Restrictions screen appears.
- Tap Enable Restrictions. iPhone displays the Set Passcode screen, which you use to specify a four-digit code that you can use to override the parental controls. (Note that this passcode is not the same as the passcode lock discussed earlier in this article.)
- Tap the four-digit restrictions passcode and then retype the code. iPhone returns you to the Restrictions screen and enables all the controls.
- In the Allow section, for each app or task, tap the On/Off switch to enable or disable the restriction.
- Under Allowed Content, tap Ratings For and then tap the country with the ratings you want to use.
- For each of the content controls - Music & Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows, Books, and Apps - tap the control and then tap the highest rating you want your children to use.
- If you don't want your children to be able to make purchases within apps, tap the In-App Purchases switch to Off. If you leave this setting on, consider tapping Require Password and then tapping Immediately. This ensures that your children must type a password before they can make in-app purchases. If you leave the Require Password setting at 15 minutes, it means your kids can make in-app purchases without a password for up to 15 minutes after the initial purchase of the app.
- If you don't want your children to make changes to certain settings, tap the corresponding setting types in the Privacy section and then tap Don't Allow Changes.
- If you don't want your children to make changes to the current mail, calendar, or contacts account settings, tap Accounts under Allow Changes, and then tap Don't Allow Changes.
- In the Game Center section, tap the On/Off switches to enable or disable multiplayer games, and to enable or disable adding friends.
- Tap General. iPhone puts the new settings into effect.
