Reply to post: Re: we need the public to become educated in the tools they are using and what can be installed

Re: we need the public to become educated in the tools they are using and what can be installed

"How exactly does selling phones with pin codes stop that?"

Quite - if anything it helps with that, because (based on a massive statistical sample of one - my mother¹) I suspect selling phones with PIN codes will result in people realising that their phones support the use of PIN codes!

Personally, I think passwords (or PINs) should be mandatory on anything of this sort - not just phones, but also tablets, laptops, desktop PCs. Too many people don't bother - so legislate so that the manufacturers (and OS developers as appropriate) have to make password/PIN access compulsory, rather than optional.

It's a dreaded nanny-state approach, but one that forces people to at least use some form of limited security, and hopefully some will go on to learn why.

^{1. technically, I'm talking about a tablet rather than a phone - but she didn't have a PIN or other form of security set up on it. My brother visited her house and used the tablet while he was there, and she was not best pleased to discover he had logged her out of Skype, and she couldn't remember the password to log in again. At which point, yours truly gets asked to sort it out. Sadly, I wasn't asked to set it up in the first place - my nephew did the deed, and couldn't remember the password he used. D'oh! Still - sorted now.}