User beware…
Got a new android smart phone at the weekend, I noticed the app telling me what the weather was like with some nice graphics of clouds going past, ‘oh that’s cool’ was my first thought, second being ‘hold on, how does it know where I am?
The next thing I noticed once I had set everything up was not only was my Gmail account open at the click of an app, without the need of logging in the same way you would on a computer, but when using it on the web for the first time all my historic search’s using Chrome on my laptop was automatically populated, including the website for my bank.
Now me being me I would not use a phone to look at my bank account, and I have stopped this, and various other bits that the phone was trying to do for ‘ease of access’ like tell everyone on facebook where I was everytime I went on it, but I wonder if how many other people do the same? Nobody in the shop told me about setting a password for my phone, the most basic of security, so I doubt many people get told about anything else, All it takes is for someone to lose their phone, it be picked up and assuming they haven’t set a password all they need to do is go to the bank listed in the history, request a new password and use the constantly open email account to be able to be logged in.
If manufactures insist on having us always online, where a pre-programed app sending GPS information to god knows who about my location, everything I have looked at on the internet on my home computer, and having my emails open for the world to see they need to tell people ‘this is what your phone will do, this is how to stop it if you want’, and not in the small print, this needs to be covered in the section after ‘how to turn on the phone’, not only that but the people in the shop need to go over this as well, I don’t care how many different colours it comes in if my bank account has just been emptied because nobody told me the phone is spying on me.