The Phone Settings Worth Changing, and the Ones You Can Ignore

Your phone holds more about you than any drawer in your house. Messages from your family. Photographs. Your bank. Your email, which can reset everything else.

Most articles about phone security respond to that by listing thirty settings to change. You do not need thirty. You need about five, and they can be done in one sitting.

Here they are, in the order that matters, with the ones you can safely ignore at the end.

1. Use a longer lock code

A four-digit code has ten thousand possibilities, which sounds like plenty until you realise that someone who knows you will start with your birth year and your house number.

Six digits is meaningfully better. Better still is a short phrase — most phones let you use words instead of numbers, and four ordinary words are both harder to guess and easier to remember than a string of digits.

Fingerprint or face unlock is fine for daily convenience, but keep a good code behind it. There will be days when the fingerprint does not read.

Also set the phone to lock itself after a minute or two of sitting idle. If you leave it on a table, that setting is what protects you.

2. Hide message previews on the lock screen

This one takes thirty seconds and matters more than people expect.

By default, many phones show the content of messages on the locked screen. Anyone who picks up your phone can read your texts without knowing your code.

That includes the security codes your bank sends you. Which means the phone-code step you set up on your accounts — the whole second layer of protection — can be read straight off a locked phone sitting on a restaurant table.

In your settings, look for notifications, and choose the option to hide the contents until the phone is unlocked. You will still see that something arrived.

3. Turn on automatic updates

Those update notices you keep postponing are not new features. They are repairs to weaknesses that criminals actively look for.

Set the phone to install them by itself, overnight. Then you never have to decide again, and the question stops appearing.

Do the same for your apps.

If you cannot find the setting, this is a perfect thing to ask a grandchild to switch on. It takes them a minute and you never think about it again.

4. Turn on the “find my phone” feature

Both kinds of phone can be located, locked, and erased remotely if they go missing — but only if the feature was switched on beforehand. You cannot turn it on after the phone is gone.

On an iPhone it is called Find My. On an Android phone it is Find My Device.

Check that it is on. Then, while you are at it, make sure someone in your family knows your account details well enough to help you use it in a panic, because the day you need it is not the day you want to be learning it.

5. Only install apps the ordinary way

Install apps from the App Store on an iPhone, or the Play Store on an Android phone. That is it.

Never install anything from a link in a text message, an email, or a pop-up warning on a website. That is one of the most common ways trouble gets onto a phone.

And be wary of apps that copy a familiar name with a slight difference. Criminals publish imitations hoping people tap the wrong one.

Worth a quiet look: what your apps can see

Every app asks permission to reach certain things — your camera, your microphone, your location, your contacts.

Some of that is reasonable. A camera app needs the camera. But many apps ask for far more than they need, because information about you is worth money to them.

Once, sit down with a family member and go through the list in your settings. The question for each one is simple: does this app need this to do its job? A game does not need your contacts. A flashlight does not need your location.

Where the option exists, choose “while using the app” rather than “always.”

This is not urgent. It is a pleasant Sunday afternoon job, and it usually results in deleting a few things you had forgotten were there.

The things you can ignore

You will read advice elsewhere about virtual private networks, encrypted messaging apps, and special cables for charging in airports. Those are not wrong, exactly. They are simply written for people who travel constantly or work with sensitive material.

For an ordinary household they are noise. If someone tries to sell you a subscription for one of them, especially over the phone, that call is far more dangerous than whatever it claims to protect you from.

Two simple habits cover almost all of it: do not do your banking on the free internet at a hotel or a coffee shop, and charge your phone from a wall socket with your own charger rather than a public USB port.

The five-minute version

Longer lock code. Message previews hidden. Automatic updates on. Find-my-phone on. Apps only from the official store.

That is the whole list. Everything else on your phone is a preference, not a protection.