editione1.0.0
Updated October 9, 2023Before starting your business, you might have been a bit laissez-faire with the software or apps you downloaded. Now that you use those same personal devices for business, you need to be a bit pickier. That doesn’t mean you can’t download what you want, it just means the consequences of bad downloads no longer affect just you—they can also affect your business.
For example, downloading a social media app like TikTok to your mobile device before might have seemed harmless, despite the laundry list of permissions it asked for and vague terms-of-service wording. But who reads those when they are using something for personal use anyways (except me and other huge nerds)? However, if you have both business and personal contacts and data on your phone, TikTok would now be able to slurp up both.
Now is a great time to do some spring cleaning of your device software and apps, and see which ones you use and need, and which can go. Similar to how we cleaned up apps with third-party access to our email, if you are unsure if you need it or not, remove it and challenge that decision later if you find yourself needing it again. This is especially the case for any software that asks for permission to data that it really doesn’t make sense to need. When you open Apple Maps and it asks for your permission to share your location so it can give you more accurate directions, those permissions make sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Sudoku app you downloaded to kill time asking for permission to read your text messages.
storyYou may be thinking: “But what about the apps and software that everyone uses? I need to use them too to keep up to date with the latest social crazes!” I hear you, and I get it. I play a lot of video games, and some of those are mobile games I play with my online guild. The developers are questionable (to be nice about it). I still play these games, but on my older devices that are no longer logged into my accounts and that no longer have my business data on them. They have some limited data; all apps need basics like name and email, but this is information that I have already accepted is on every possible spam and scam list one can imagine. This is the perfect use for those devices that you have cleaned up and don’t use, which we will get to later.
storyWhen I was younger, my parents were terrible at keeping track of their keys. For Christmas one year, I got them one of those keychains that beeps when you misplace them and need help finding them. We set up a similar feature on their iPad a few years later, which came in handy when my parents accidentally left it at a customer’s office.
Most devices and phones nowadays have lost device features built into their operating system that can be enabled. Doing this gives you two options:
Learning where your device is, so you can go retrieve it.