With everything that’s going on today in the celebrity world where hackers where able to get intimate pictures from their accounts, privacy on your phones and electronic devices has become quite a hot topic. Questions arise such as how safe are the things we put into our smartphones? How easy will it be for someone to bypass the security in our devices?
Unfortunately, there will always be people who come after our data for malicious purposes. But we do have steps we can take to better protect our phone privacy. Although is not full proof, it sure helps to be a bit on the safer side.
Here is our step by step guide on how to encrypt your Android phone.
- First step is to go into your phone settings. Then tap on security then encryption and finally screen lock. Under the screen lock options you can find the word PIN. That is what you need to tap on.
- After tapping on the PIN you are then presented with the option to Encrypt phone, under it is a phrase that would tell you that you would “require a numeric PIN or password to decrypt your phone each time you power it on”.
- Upon clicking on the encrypt phone option the phone will then prompt you to enter a numeric PIN or password to begin encryption. It is best to create a longer password to decrease the chance of people guessing it.
- Make sure your phone is plugged in, since it will now begin encrypting your settings, downloaded apps, data and media files, and other files such as SMS or call messages. The whole process will take close to an hour to finish depending on how much files you have inside your phone.
- Upon completion of the encryption, you will again be asked to input the PIN or password that you came up with earlier.
Your phone is now encrypted and would need to have the password or pin encoded every time you restart it. No longer will you need to worry if you lose your phone or if it gets stolen. Just make sure you don’t forget your password or else you would need to restore factory settings to take off the encryption and lose all your data in the process.
