Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011, when the app was still in beta. Research In Motion later renamed itself BlackBerry, and the legacy BlackBerry OS services the app relied on have been discontinued.
We increasingly carry our private lives around on our phones, yet as a rule we don’t stop to think how badly losing our phone would hurt us: we would be leaving photos, videos, banking details, contacts and more in someone else’s hands.
And this isn’t just a problem when a phone goes missing, because our smartphones are small computers that are not immune to hacker attacks. Just ask our friend Scarlett Johansson, who had compromising photos stolen from her smartphone.
Research In Motion has released a BlackBerry app that is still in beta. The app is free and, if your smartphone is stolen or lost, lets you wipe all your data remotely. It also lets you locate your phone on a map, back up and restore your data, and even put a message on the screen so that whoever finds the phone knows who to return it to.
This kind of app is clearly already in high demand across mobile operating systems, and it is certainly wise to have it, because you never know whose hands your phone might fall into or what might be done with all the data we store on it.
Featured image: bertconcepts, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
