Do you lock your phone?

[MeanOldLady]

@SciFiSam

Like I said, if I didn’t report it straight away I’d be stuck with the bill. An acquaintance once stole my phone in my house and it took me a day to realise, because I knew it was at home and never thought he’d have taken it. So I had to pay the bill from the time he had it till the time I reported it; several hundred quid. (Insurance wouldn’t pay out on the phone either).

The same would apply if it took you a few hours to report it while you were out.

What cell phone company was this?

I know for sure Sprint and AT&T won’t make you pay fraudulent charges at all, and if there’s a major carrier that does, they suck a significant amount of balls. It doesn’t even make sense to make you pay for charges incurred between when it was stolen and when you reported it. Most of the time, unless you’re being mugged, you’re not going to actually see your phone being stolen, so it’ll be a while before you can report it. It’s not at all unreasonable that someone wouldn’t notice a missing phone until the next day. I didn’t. Making you pay for the downtime between your phone being swiped and noting it’s gone is cray cray. Whoever that carrier was, please tell me it’s not T-Mobile, because that’s who I’m with now. Hopefully it was some UK company that we don’t have out here and I never have to deal with.

So anywho, as of yesterday, I’ve stopped locking my phone. I feel so much freer! My life is better already!

[SciFiSam]

@MeanOldLady

What cell phone company was this?

I know for sure Sprint and AT&T won’t make you pay fraudulent charges at all, and if there’s a major carrier that does, they suck a significant amount of balls. It doesn’t even make sense to make you pay for charges incurred between when it was stolen and when you reported it. Most of the time, unless you’re being mugged, you’re not going to actually see your phone being stolen, so it’ll be a while before you can report it. It’s not at all unreasonable that someone wouldn’t notice a missing phone until the next day. I didn’t. Making you pay for the downtime between your phone being swiped and noting it’s gone is cray cray. Whoever that carrier was, please tell me it’s not T-Mobile, because that’s who I’m with now. Hopefully it was some UK company that we don’t have out here and I never have to deal with.

So anywho, as of yesterday, I’ve stopped locking my phone. I feel so much freer! My life is better already!

Vodafone. I’m pretty sure they’re not the only ones who’d do it, though.

[Kamino_Neko]

I only have a tablet, not a phone, but, similar principle.

No, I don’t lock it, really. I use the ‘swipe to unlock’ thing that it’s set to as a default.

I did, for a while, not long after I got it, but I kept messing up the swipe pattern to unlock it, and since I don’t use it for banking or the like, it was just too much trouble for the off chance I’d do something dumb like leave it on the bus. Now I just leave the default swipe ‘lock’ screen so I don’t accidentally change pages in the book I’m reading, or mess up the game I’m playing if I accidentally wake it up while it’s in my pocket.

[si_blakely]

I have the security lock on my phone (connect the dots swipe). I regularly wipe the screen to fuzz the smear, and have a lock-screen ICE app for emergency contacts and my own contact details and medical information.

I did find an iPhone on the road the other day when out cycling - it wasn’t locked (it was running a GPS exercise tracking app as the owner was cycling) and I was able to use it to contact the owner. But a decent ICE screen solves that problem (can you do that on an iPhone?).

[Mangetout]

I didn’t lock my old Android phone (although I probably should have), but my new Windows 8 phone has nearly all of my online accounts in it (mainly because it’s so very much better at integrating all the email accounts, contact lists and calendars), so I have to.