Turn on theft protection before your next trip

At home we’ll leave a phone on a hawker centre table to hold the seat, and it’s still there when we come back with the food. A lot of us will carry that habit onto a plane in December, to cities that work very differently.

London recorded more than 71,000 phone thefts and robberies last year, which is close to two hundred a day, and that was down from more than 81,000 the year before. What’s more useful than the count is how they’re taken. “Victims would just be walking down the street on the phone and the phone is snatched from their hand,” Commander Andy Featherstone, who leads the Met’s work on phone theft, told The National last month.

A phone taken out of your hand is a phone that’s already unlocked. Your banking apps, your email and your saved passwords are sitting behind a lock screen the thief never has to get past. Android and iPhone both have a setting built for exactly this, and on a lot of phones it’s still waiting to be switched on.

Your lock screen protects a phone that’s lying on a table. It does nothing for the one that was unlocked in your hand when it left.

If you’re on Android, open Settings and search for Theft protection. Turn on Theft Detection Lock, which uses the phone’s motion sensors to notice a grab-and-run and locks the screen on the spot. Turn on Offline Device Lock, which locks it if the thief cuts the connection to stop you tracking it. Then set up Remote Lock, which lets you lock the phone from any browser at android.com/lock using only your phone number, and Identity Check, which demands your fingerprint or face before anyone can change sensitive settings away from places you’ve marked as trusted. Google extended that last one this year to cover banking apps and its password manager.

If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings, then Face ID & Passcode, and find Stolen Device Protection. With it on, someone who has your phone and has watched you type your passcode still can’t change your Apple Account password or switch off Find My without your face, then an hour’s wait, then your face again. Apple began turning this on for people in an update earlier this year, but its own support page only goes as far as saying it “might be turned on by default”, so look for yourself. While you’re there, set Require Security Delay to Always, so the protection doesn’t relax in places your phone has decided are familiar.

Do this on the sofa this week and not at the departure gate, because Remote Lock won’t work until your phone number is verified, and Stolen Device Protection has a few requirements of its own that you don’t want to meet for the first time in a queue. Then memorise one web address, android.com/lock or icloud.com/find, since the device you’d normally look it up on is the one that’s gone.

Google’s list of what each setting does and Apple’s are both short reads.