I'm genuinely curious. I'm a late adopter FWIW and am still rocking an older iPhone that doesn't support any face recognition or finger prints. But I don't use a pass code either, and never have, and doubt I ever will. I just don't get it... what are folks afraid of happening if they don't lock their phone? I suppose the "nightmare" scenario would be someone steals your phone and then messages your contacts asking for $. Is that it?

I've always practiced greater digital security than physical security (counting the phone unlock as physical) as I think it much more likely that a ne'er-do-well would attack some large company than to single me out in person. I mean if the FBI or some hacker is going through my garbage then I probably have larger problems, right?

For me it's cost/benefit - swiping/fingerprinting/face IDing multiple times a day is not worth the slim chance that my phone is stolen by someone who going to use the info in it for something nefarious. I wouldn't lock my car if I was in/out of 20x a day, I just wouldn't leave anything terribly valuable in it.

Please let me know why locking your phone is/isn't important to you.

EDIT: To be clear, I have one banking app and it requires an additional password to get in. It's an app so there isn't a saved password for it anywhere.

EDIT2: Made this as a comment below, but thought I'd add it up here as well - "I find it strange that people in general seem to be OK with putting up with an inconvenience (even though minor to many) that affects them multiple times a day, but we hold large companies almost wholly unaccountable for major data breaches. "

EDIT3: This just occurred to me. We lock our phones, but not our wallets/purses. The argument that a pass-code is a protection against identity theft rings sort of hollow when we consider we have much of the same info on an ID card that we keep unprotected. Some states will even list the SSN on a driver's license.

EDIT4: I'm convinced everyone thinks their personal lives are terribly interesting to strangers and my suspicion is they're not. Only two real cases of bad things happening when a phone is unlocked that I've counted so far: 1) long distance calls 2) pokemon themed contacts.

EDIT5: That said, sounds like the fingerprint scanner is the way to go for convenient security. I'll be checking that out. Sincere thanks!

EDIT6: Some folks said that edit 4 came off as condescending. Not my intention. I was trying to tie in the idea of "everyone being the main character in their own story." I'm definitely not implying that people should leave their phones unlocked because others wouldn't find their lives uninteresting.

I think many have a personal connection to their devices that I do not feel. Intellectually I find that very interesting as this seems less a monetary issue and more a privacy issue. It'd be as if a stranger picked up a lost diary and started reading. I fear my diary would be more like a ship captain's logbook and wholly uninteresting. If I were to have my phone stolen I'd simply change a couple passwords and buy a new one.

I recently enabled controlled folder access in Windows 10. It restricts programs from modifying folders in a blacklist.

I have all of the music/pictures/videos/documents/desktop folders and folders containing backups added, is there anything else I should consider adding?

hey all!

i made a post awhile back talking about how i was in a tech rut, and tired of creating the same things over and over again, working with the same libraries and the same frameworks.

i was bored of it!

so last week i said hell with it and i spent more money than i should've on udemy courses, learned a lot about javascript and the mern stack (mongodb, express.js, react, node.js)

then, after a few nights of staying up way later than i should have (i have presently been awake for 27 hours) i built this thing:

https://dry-castle-80238.herokuapp.com/dashboard

dev-connector.

a small little social media site for the technically-minded.

nothing groundbreaking or super fancy - just a basic social media site with posts, comments, user profiles and all that. but it's the first thing in awhile that i've actually finished and put into production on some capacity (even if it's just heroku)

jump in, leave a few comments, and let me know what you think. :)

passwords are hashed with bcryptjs, but i've been recommending everyone just use fake login info on sign up for safety's sake.

Google knows a lot about its users. Facebook knows a lot about its users. FitBit knows a lot about its users. And so on.

But what happens when these companies all sell their data sets to one another? It'd be pretty trivial to link even anonymized users from set to set by looking for specific features. If I went for a run, Google tracked my location, FitBit tracked my heart rate, and Facebook tracked my status about my new best mile time, for example. Thus, Google can narrow down who I am in the other sets using pre-existing information that coincides with theirs. With enough overlap they can figure out exactly who I am fairly easily. Furthermore, each additional layer of data makes this discovery process from new data sets even easier, as it gives more opportunities to confirm or rule out concurrent info. So then when, say, Credit Karma, Comcast, and Amazon's data enter the fray, my online identity stops looking like an individual egg in each different basket but a whole lot of eggs in all in one. And they can do this across millions/billions of users--not just me!

I don't know for certain that this is a thing that happens, but... I have to assume it definitely is happening, right? How could it not? With how valuable data is and how loose protections are, this seems like a logical and potentially very lucrative step.

Right now, is there an aggregate version of "me" that exists in a data store somewhere that is a more comprehensive and accurate picture than my own self-image? After all, my memory and perception are imperfect and biased, but data stores aren't.