Losing Your iPhone

My mom recently lost her iPhone. It was in her purse, which got placed on the top of the car, where it stayed when the car was driven off as she and my dad went home. There’s no way to know where it ended up. I spent a couple of hours helping them reset passwords and figure out how to deal with the situation.

My siblings and I have been pretty proactive with getting my parents online and connected. They’re both over 70, but also both have iPhones. My dad has a MacBook Air and my mom has an iPad. They share an iMac in their home office. For my mom in particular, this level of connection is a real blessing. She is stuck in a wheelchair most of the time, and so being able to communicate with everyone via phone, email, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. is a huge improvement in her ability to connect with her family on a day to day basis.

There were a few lessons from this event:

1. All of your devices, whether iOS, Mac, or another platform, should require a passcode or password to access the device whenever you want to use it. This may be a minor hassle, but if the device is ever lost or stolen, you will be very, very glad you had this in place. The security problems my mom had would have taken twice as much time to deal with if the phone hadn’t required a passcode.
2. All devices should absolutely be logged into an iCloud account. This gives you some ability to interact with them when lost or stolen.
3. Given the above two points, if the phone is lost or stolen, don’t do what my parents did and call the carrier to cancel the account. As soon as they did that, we couldn’t use iCloud to locate or lock out the phone. It would have been preferable if we could have used iCloud to do this, but since AT&T had already canceled the phone, we couldn’t.
4. In my opinion, the technology industry has failed so far when it comes to user authentication. Making my parents try to keep track of a dozen or more passwords for their various accounts does not work.
   They are not technical enough to use anything like 1Password, and yet keeping track of passwords on paper has its obvious security flaws. I hope Apple extends Touch ID to the Macbook and iMac product lines and that developers integrate it into their authentication mechanisms to reduce the need for passwords.

~John Newhoff

Have Phone, Will Travel

Last year I took an extended trip to Latin America, a dream I had for a long time. As my husband and I prepared for our adventure, we considered what to do with our cell phone plans. We didn’t want to continue to pay the AT&T bill while we were abroad, so we looked into having our iPhones unlocked by AT&T, which turned out to be incredibly easy. I didn’t want to lose my existing cell phone number entirely so I opted to have the phone number ported to Google Voice, for a one-time fee of $20. With my number in Google Voice, I downloaded the Google Hangouts app, where I could send and receive texts and phone calls from my existing phone number. This works out really well to maintain that phone number without having to have an actual cell phone plan tied to it. Once the phones were unlocked and we began our journey south, we were able to purchase SIM cards in each country we visited. It typically went like this. We entered a country and in the first few days we would ask the locals about which provider had the best cell phone service. In South America, there are two pretty big competitors, Claro and Movistar, but there are others depending on which country you are in. When we decided on a provider, we would inquire where we could buy a SIM card. It was always an adventure trying to determine where to purchase the SIM card. In Nicaragua, we were sent to about 5 different stores before finding the right office. After purchasing the card, typically for around one dollar, we would visit a corner store where they would be able to load our cards with money so we could use the phone. In all of the countries we visited, the cell phone companies offered very cheap promotions when reloading a card. In Colombia, there was a promotion where you could have two chosen numbers and when you called either of these numbers, the first five minutes of the call was free. Making local calls, texting and surfing the web were quite cheap. I usually put a few dollars on my phone at a time and that was enough to get by for a few weeks. Any time I wanted to call the States, I would use the Google Hangouts app. With Google Voice, it is free to make phone calls to the United States and Canada. The process of finding, purchasing, and setting up the cell phones was a little tedious at times, but I happen to enjoy this kind of travel - where I get to interact with locals, force myself to learn the language, and learn about something I typically would not. So for me, the adventure of using an international cell phone was part of the fun. Plus I didn’t have to give up my existing phone number when I left the country. It was a win-win! ~Kate Waldhauser