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Update your Siri settings or risk revealing personal info from a locked iPhone

By Liu Hongzuo - on 26 Feb 2017, 7:00am

Update your Siri settings or risk revealing personal info from a locked iPhone

Siri thinks I'm a moron. I'm inclined to agree.

Siri is still capable of revealing a trove of valuable personal information if you’re not careful enough about the way you use your iPhone.

By now, most iPhone users would be familiar with the basic security settings that would render most misplaced iPhones inert in the wrong hands. However, it takes a lot more than disabling a feature or two to fully protect your data. Here are some of our findings that can help to improve your phone’s security.

Our trial was largely inspired by a Twitter user, @afronomics_, who successfully extracted a user’s personal details from a misplaced and locked iPhone. She was able to acquire the owner’s name, residential address, last called person, last parking location, and other alarming details before returning it to its owner. Of course, it’s wise to take social media comments with a pinch of salt, but it’s wiser to check if it could be replicated. And we did.  

The phone we tried with is secured – in the general sense. Not only was Passcode and Touch ID enabled, the iPhone 6s Plus was running on iOS 10.2.1 – the latest build at the time of writing which supposedly patched most of Siri’s older vulnerabilities back in the day.

A successful attempt would result in Siri feeding personal information to the interrogator. In our trials, it was able to share a full name, where the person works, and who he last called. Perhaps the most disturbing feature was its ability to share some iOS Calendar details, revealing that the user will be headed to MWC 2017 – complete with a time and date.

 

How do I further protect my data?

It’s unrealistic to use a smartphone, only to nuke all personal data off the device (if so, you might be better off with the refreshed Nokia 3310). However, there are ways to prevent the locked iPhone from giving too much information away.

Besides the obvious disabling of Siri’s “Access When Locked” feature, you will need to disable App Support if you don’t want your Facebook and WhatsApp contacts and details to be accessible (all these are found under Settings > Siri).

There are also other Siri settings tucked away under Settings > Touch ID & Passcode. Head over there and disable the following options found under “Allow Access When Locked”: Today View, Notifications View, and Siri. With these disabled, your pull-down menu and your day’s activities won’t be shown while you’re on a locked screen.

Once that’s done, try reviewing what you can grab off your locked iPhone, and only re-enable features you need or don’t mind sharing.

Note: This article was first published on Feb 24, 2017.

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