In honor of the 3 smartphones that were lost at our workplace today:

[melannen]

PLEASE set up an "In Case Of Emergency" contact on your phone.

The chance that you will keel over with some kind of dramatic medical condition and the paramedics will need to quickly contact a next of kin may be fairly low*.

But the chances that you will accidentally leave it in a public place and the people who find it (or who run the lost & found it was turned in to) would like to be able to call someone who can tell you where it is are much higher.

If you don't keep it locked, set up a phone contact for "ICE" or "If lost" or "in case of emergency" who is someone you trust who will a) be able to contact you somehow even if you've lost your phone and b) who will be able contact your other loved ones if for some reason you can't.

If you do keep it locked, some phones let you set up a list of emergency contacts that can be called even if the phone is locked. If not, at least put some identifying information on the lock screen so we can look up your library account and get contact info there!

(In related advice. Don't set up your email so you can only access it if you have your phone! When you've lost access to your only phone is when you will need your email as your backup contact method the most! We want to help but we can't get you into your email if you've linked it to your phone and your phone was stolen! and it doesn't help that you've set up your boyfriend's phone as the backup if you can't reach your boyfriend without access to your phone or email!)

---your friendly local librarian

*those of you this doesn't apply to know who you are

Comments

[ratcreature]

I've never lost my smartphone but can't you locate them anyway if you have the location turned on?

[rmc28]

My lock screen displays my email address for this exact reason (and I can get into my email from a bunch of places without my phone, and would be prioritising doing so if ever I lost it).

[sylvaine]

Thank you for this reminder!

[jesse_the_k]

A++ reminder. Now I know why I can set my lock screen and background screen separately.

[jesse_the_k]

At least on iOS, you have to provide explicit permission to people who can locate your phone. And it doesn't help in the case where, "I lost my phone--where did I go today?"

[ratcreature]

Ah, I have never used an iPhone. With Android you can see your devices if you are logged into the associated google account. Like I once missed my phone at work, logged into my Google account and could see that my phone was still at my home address, so I knew I had just forgotten to take it, not lost it somewhere.

[melannen]

you usually can, but it requires that you have location services on, that you have another way to access the internet to do it (that if it requires logging into an account, you haven't locked that account to your phone), that you've noticed your phone is gone, that the phone was turned on and the battery hasn't died, and that we didn't lock it in the metal safe where lost and found valuables go after closing. And that you know it's possible.

whereas if you have an obvious emergency number, we can often contact your person and they contact you before you even know it's gone.

and of course location services don't help if you're incapacitated and emergency services want to contact someone for you, which is the original purpose of emergency contacts.

[melannen]

Yeah, I think the "make sure you can still get to your email even if you lose your phone" rule applies a lot more to the average library computer user than it does to the average DW user!

On the other hand, we have had desperate people come in saying "my house flooded/blew over/was hit by lightning and I lost access to all my devices" so if you're limiting it to certain devices (or IPs), make sure at least one of them lives offsite! Preferably very offsite.

[poshmerchant]

For folks using Google Authenticator and similar to secure your email, you can set up desktop access to security codes using something like Authy.