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Updated October 9, 2023storyWhen 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.
Wiping the device, if you’re unable to retrieve it. This will turn your device into a concrete brick, rather than a golden brick of data.
important The important thing is turning this on now, because it can’t be turned on after the fact. With how often you move around and work on the go, you will misplace your device eventually. I admit to having to use the “find my device” feature at least three times in the last year. Usually it is just buried under a stack of books or left behind in the car (thankfully), but I am always glad I have the peace of mind of being able to track it down.
danger There is an important privacy tradeoff to note here. These features can also be misused to track your location if you constantly keep your devices on you. For example, if your iPhone rarely leaves your back pocket, someone else could use Find My iPhone to see where you are. Typically, you can access Find My services by logging into the email account that is tied to your device, like your Apple account. These types of location services can be a huge privacy risk if others have access to the account logged into your device. So while you might turn on these services to find your device that you might eventually lose, it can also be used by someone else to find you or track your movements.
We don’t explore those risks in detail in this book, as we assume that you are able to protect access to these accounts and not share them with anyone else. However, we know it’s not that simple for all business owners. There are groups that specialize in providing security advice to people with high privacy needs, such as those who need to maintain privacy and anonymity of their contacts (like an investigative journalist) or need to maintain their own privacy (like those dealing with stalkers or abusive relationships).
important You should set all your devices up to back up, automatically and daily, to a cloud-based storage account. This is important because there may come a time where your device is infected or lost, and you need to restore it back to the point before this happened. With the rise of destructive malware, like ransomware, and the fact that we are often on the move and at risk of losing devices, having a backup gives you peace of mind that you can hit “undo” on that whole bad outcome.
controversy The concept of using “cloud storage” can be concerning because it still feels new for a lot of us. There is also a fair share of bad takes and jokes from technical people about how “the cloud is just someone else’s computer.” This isn’t necessarily wrong, it just doesn’t consider the alternative—using a computer that you do own and control. This alternative takes time to learn and set it up right, and requires ongoing maintenance to make sure that the computer is kept up-to-date and secured. While I might have a hard drive at home that I use to copy important files to as a backup, I know this isn’t an option I can expect from others.
The cloud-based storage that you will end up using will be the one provided by the device manufacturer or email account tied to that device. Vendors like Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and Google have been in the cloud storage game since before we called it “the cloud.” The original iPhone released in 2007 had an app called MobileMe, which helped users back up their devices to their MobileMe account. Before that, 2002 Mac devices could use software from Apple called .Mac, which would allow you to perform your own personal backups to their iDisk service. These services and software were the blueprints that Apple used for making iCloud in 2011. So if you feel uneasy with the term “cloud,” just remember that we have been using these services for years now, minus the cool, hip name rebranding. As long as you secure that account using the advice we have given you, you’ll be fine using cloud-based storage.