A couple of days ago my beloved first generation iPhone was lost/stolen. I immediately called my network operator to have the SIM card locked, but that wouldn’t help much when it came to all the information still sitting on the phone – anyone who’d get their hands on my precious baby would simply just have to “Slide to unlock” and voila!, they’d have access to all my personal information. My mail! Contacts! Calendars! I had been stupid enough to keep the passcode lock disabled.
Thankfully, hardly anything on the phone could be labeled NSFW, although I would consider any kind of personal information “sensitive”. I went from a frustrated and angry mood to a somewhat more relieved one when I came across an interesting discussion on Apple’s web site regarding stolen iPhones. Immediately change your passwords to all the accounts that you’ve set up on the iPhone, and the founder of the phone wont be able to access your mail any longer (it’s IMAP after all). Better yet, trying to manually delete or add any entries in the Calendar or Contacts will of course have no effect on my MobileMe account.
Checking out the prices of the new iPhones and all the various options on Telia’s web site didn’t make me too happy though, until Per (who’d bought an iPhone 3G a while ago) told me that I could borrow his old one – he had kept it in a box “just in case”.
My latest backup was from the day before, so I successfully managed to restore everything back to normal (including my fairly high average score on reMovem).
Lessons learned: always have the passcode lock on. Things will happen when you least expect them to. As an extra precaution, one might also consider to keep the “SIM PIN” option enabled.
