Five Smartphone Settings Worth Checking This Week

You don't need to become a technology expert to keep your phone secure. These five checks take a few minutes each and meaningfully reduce your risk.

1. Screen lock

Make sure your phone requires a passcode, fingerprint, or face scan to unlock. Without this, anyone who picks up your phone has open access to your email, banking apps, and photos.

2. Software updates

Those "update available" notifications you've been dismissing often contain security fixes for problems that scammers actively try to exploit. Check your settings for pending updates and let them install, ideally overnight so it doesn't interrupt your day.

3. Find My Phone

This feature (called "Find My iPhone" or "Find My Device" on Android) lets you locate, lock, or erase your phone remotely if it's ever lost or stolen — protecting everything stored on it even if the phone itself is gone.

4. App permissions

Take a few minutes to check which apps have access to your location, camera, microphone, and contacts. If a simple flashlight app has access to your contacts, that's worth turning off — it doesn't need it to function.

5. Unknown senders and messages

Check whether your phone has a setting to filter messages from unknown senders into a separate folder, keeping suspicious texts from landing directly alongside messages from people you know.

You don't have to find these menus alone

Every phone hides these settings in a slightly different place, and that's genuinely frustrating. This is exactly the kind of hands-on walkthrough we do during a Visit — we'll find every one of these on your specific phone with you.