It’s getting to be that the phone you carry with you is the most important thing you have. It has the names, phone numbers and now addresses of most of the people and places you frequent; it often has your personal email accounts and social network logins stored on it; it may have apps installed to let you bank from anywhere, any time or have apps installed that know where you and your friends are in real time.

Considering how much information is on the phone, it’s remarkable how relaxed people are about them. They hand them over to friends all the time to let them “play” with them. I’ve see people ask strangers to take pictures of them and their friends. They almost never have any kind of passcode set to access the device, they almost never use the encryption settings on the phone, and they almost always set every application to save their passwords. Once someone gains physical access to the phone, its short work to totally compromise their identity. It doesn’t matter if you use an iPhone or an Android-based device, the same applies equally.

The theft of a smartphone is a one-stop-shop for wholesale identity theft, and most people don’t seem to understand or care.