In the last week I had a customer almost lose his iPhone and a friend actually lose it. The lost one was only out of sight a few minutes before someone snatched it up and decided to make it theirs. By making it theirs I mean they went so far as to erase his voicemail message! So now there’s someone out there with his phone and all his data. While my friend was able to shut off service to it and reclaim the phone number, his personal data, email and other stuff is still on there. All the creepy thief needs is a wifi connection and they are able to get into his Facebook account, email and any other app that saves his password. Scary, right? There’s actually a feature on the iPhone that could prevent them from having any of this access. Not only can you set up your iPhone to have a password so they can’t access your data, you can have it erase the device if they make 10 attempts to hack your password. Nice, no? Here’s how you set it up:

Go into your Settings, then go to General, and then Passcode Lock. It will ask you to set a password and verify it. Once you do that then you can flip the switch to erase data.

While having to type in a passcode to open up your iPhone may seem annoying it’s not as annoying as having some creepy stranger have access to your photos, emails and everything else on your iPhone. I’ve been meaning to post this for over a week now. While I feel bad as I could have helped my friend, I know him too well and he would have ignored this

[UPDATED 6/12/09] It occurred to me that if you have the Mobile Me “Find my iPhone” feature you should probably NOT turn on the “Erase Data” part of this. If the Evil Doer has your phone and is smart enough to erase the data it would also erase the information that allows you to track your phone. UPDATE to my update, a trusted Apple security expert says it takes 24 hours to erase your data by failed password attempts.