In today’s world, smart phones play an important role for many people and businesses. People use smart phones because it allows them to do many tasks on the go, checking e-mail, viewing bank statements and balances even social networking. For many it has also become a status symbol. To own the latest iPhone or Android is no longer about just function, many of the phones features are never even understood or used. It is about the bragging rights. To stand amongst your friends and family and hold up the shiny new phone and feel superior. The real question though, is are these new phones really better for us, or are they making us better targets for identity theft, privacy invasion and hacking attempts.

There have been several changes to phone technology since the cell phone was invented in the 1970’s and used the analog system of sending information. The analog system was unencrypted and could be intercepted by anyone with common electronic devices available at Radio Shack. Next was iDen (Integrated Digital Enhanced Network), which used digital waves instead of analog. It has evolved into what we know now as Nextel’s Push-to-Talk feature. More secure than analog, but still easy to intercept and decode. TDMA (Time Division Media Access) was implemented by AT&T in the 1990’s. It featured a voice security that enabled encryption on your phone based on your voice. However if you enabled it, your phone would not work because AT&T never installed the software on their servers.

GMS (Global System Mobile, recently renamed Global System for Mobile Communications) is the current leading system used in the world today. It uses a smart chip or SIM card that stores your data and information and can be transferred between phones. This system uses a digital encryption between your phone and the base tower, and then sends the information over the providers network, re-encrypts it at the tower and decrypts it at the receiving phone. While this seems secure, anyone on the providers network has complete access to your information, conversations and data. The government, any organization with access to the providers switching stations or even a suitably motivated hacker can access your information as well.

Lastly CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is used by several US based phone companies. This system uses encryption locked by a set of electronic ‘keys.’ In theory this would be a very secure system as only the holders of these ‘keys’ would be able to access the information stored and transmitted by your phone. However the keys are not kept secret. While not public domain, any hacker willing to spend a few hours can easily obtain many codes.

This certainly makes you want to go out and buy a phone doesn’t it? In modern society phones are no longer phones. They have become miniature computers in the hands of every Tom, Dick and Harry of the planet. You do not expect everyone with a car to be a mechanic. You do not expect everyone with a toilet to be a plumber. You certainly do not expect parents to be able to provide all the medical treatment their child will ever need. Yet phone companies do expect you to be the systems administrator for your own private network, or your cell phone. Fortunately there are very simple steps that can reduce your cell phones footprint on the digital world.

SIM Cards are used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the United States. SIM stand for Subscriber Identity Module and is a small plastic chip with your stored phone number personal information, text messages and other data. What makes these cards useful is you can take it out of one phone and insert it in another. The new phone will then use the data from the chip to send and receive calls. While this feature sound great, the problem is that all of you information sits on that card. The longer the card is used, the larger footprint it leaves on the digital world. Picture the SIM Card as a receipt from your local store. You use it for a year and the receipt is six inches long with 24 items of your personal information and data on it. Use it for two years and it is a foot long and has over 48 items of your personal information and data on it. Now imagine someone that has used the same SIM Card from their original Android or iPhone and still has it for the latest model. Every bank account, text message and social networking site is recorded. All of your passwords, routing numbers, addresses and contacts are stored. Remember when you or your significant other was feeling frisky and took that provocative photo and sent it to you, well it is on that card to! Now when I say it is on the card, all of the data is not actually on the card. The card has a unique number assigned to it and can be used to pull up all of your information. The data is stored on an encrypted network that is easiest to access with your card. It can be hacked, but retrieving the data is significantly harder that way.

There is a very simple fix for this. You can buy your big fancy phone from what ever provider you want. However when they break out the SIM Card to install it stop them. You can buy pre-paid SIM Cards with limited minutes and data on them, just like a phone card. Just like a phone card it is possible to reload them. These cards still store the data like the one your carrier would have provided, however it is not tied to your name or personal information. Your carrier will probably not enjoy you using a pre-paid SIM, and you will have to pay full price for the phone since you are not going to be using their services, but when you use up all of the minutes and data on the SIM card, you dispose of it and install a new one. The trick is to use the card up with in two months of installing it. On average it takes 3 to 5 months for a SIM card to be fully integrated into the system and make its information accessible to would be thieves and hackers. The easiest way to get a hold of this data is with the physical SIM card and the appropriate hardware and software. So this leads to the proper method of disposal.

Think of the SIM card as a hard disk drive for a computer and take the same steps you would for the HDD as you do for the SIM card. Start with immersion in water for an hour. The SIM is smaller and less water tight than the HDD so this will be long enough. Next place it between two electro magnets. You may be thinking, where does the average Joe get electro magnets? Any speaker in your home or car that runs on electricity is essentially an electro magnet. Remove the casing, play your favorite music while the card is between two speakers back to back. Failing that if you work at a store that uses security devices to deter shoplifting, the device at the cash register is an electro magnet. Tape the card to the underside for your shift and retrieve it afterwards. You will then want to physically damage the SIM card. Break it in half, crack the yellow/gold part, scratch it any method that physically disfigures it will work. Your wondering why not just break it in half and forget the other steps? Because you can place the pieces back side by side and read all the information around the break and still retrieve a majority of the data. The final step before putting the SIM card in the garbage is to place it in alcohol, gasoline or a similar product. This removes anything that may be left on the surface, from data to a protective coating on the SIM. It also removes fingerprints if you are that worried. You can now place the SIM card in the trash and not worry about your data being retrieved.

So you now have a nice pile of pre-paid SIM cards in a drawer and successfully gotten rid of your old carriers SIM card properly. All of a sudden OMG LOL , there is a new phone out, JUST RELEASED!!! You absolutely must have this phone, if not you will be the laughing stock of the entire world. So you shell out the six hundred dollars on the new phone, which most of the features will be unavailable because your SIM is not registered to some big name company, so the app store will not work. But you have your social status symbol and that is all that matters in today’s society any ways right? Since you use a SIM card, it is safe to just toss the old phone away because nothing was stored on it. Wrong. Many phones come with both an internal storage and a removable storage. The removable storage usually comes as an SD micro card, easily removed from either the side of the phone, or under/beside the battery. But what to do with the internal storage? A simple factory reset will not delete everything. There have been several studies where an organization will buy old cell phones off E-bay, Amazon or from local stores. All of the phones were said to be free of all information. The organizations which purchased the phones were able to get data from ALL of the phones. This ranged from the old owners name and address to text messages and songs to bank card numbers and passwords.

The simplest way to ensure that no one can get your information off of your old phone is to destroy the phone. Run it over repeatedly. Smash it with a hammer until nothing is left bigger than a penny. Burn it in a bonfire. You can get very creative with this, but you have to ensure that it is completely and thoroughly destroyed. Some phones use more than one internal storage unit. Some will store information on the memory. If you do not feel like venting your frustrations on your old phone, you can also call the manufacture or the service provider who sold it to you. They can walk you through step by step methods that are supposedly able to remove all data from the offending phone. You can try this, but the only sure fire way to ensure the data is gone is by destruction.

Say you can not live with out access to the app store because the latest game of throwing rabid skunks at buildings had to be downloaded, or you want to butcher zombies with a Muppet wielding a flyswatter. This means going back to the big name SIM card from a national carrier, or switching to a provider which doesn’t use SIM cards. Earlier I mentioned a brief history of the different types of systems developed for cellular security. GMS (SIM card phone) and CDMA (non SIM card phones) are the two most prevalent in the United States today. While you can use pre-paid SIM cards for the GMS system to feel a little more secure, there is no such option for the CDMA. Your phone is registered and imprinted with your data, unless you are using pre-paid SIM-less phones. You may be thinking that you are screwed and there is noting you can do about it. The truth of the matter is that it is easier for the data to be intercepted (by the government, thieves or hackers) with a wire tap at a tower or server that to decrypt it in its digital form.

No matter what phone or carrier you end up using there are some safety precautions you can take that are universal. When downloading applications from a marketplace, look at the permissions it requires. If you are downloading a calculator, does it need access to your contact lists? Does a game need SMS and data usage? If it looks like it is asking for something that the app should not need, do not download it. Creating malware is easy for people with even minimal programming knowledge. You simply download a working app, modify the source code to include anything from spyware to a virus. Upload the app back to the market place and people will download it with out even verifying if it is the app they thought it was.

Speaking of spyware, it is possible for anyone to purchase spyware programs legally. Using it on the other hand can be anywhere from illegal to a gray area of the law. Many parents use applications to track their children, believe it or not this is spyware. It installs on the phone, monitors calls, data and even physical location. It is designed to not show up in the installed app list, nor will it appear on the list of apps running. There are dozens of stories of both men and women installing a tracker on their significant others phone, catching them in a lie or cheating, then either splitting with them if it was a casual relationship, or getting a divorce if they were married. The interesting part is if the software was installed with out consent, the person caught can easily win any divorce settlement for infringement of rights, infringement of privacy and several other laws. It is ironic that these same programs that can get phone users in trouble are being actively used by the government for ‘homeland defense.’

Everyone knows about spyware, malware and virus. There are many other things phone users do not even think of. Have you ever ordered something over the phone using your credit card numbers? Now have you ever done this on a bus, in a café or other public location. Giving this information verbally over the phone also gives it to everyone in earshot, and they did not do anything even remotely illegal to get it!

When using Wi-Fi, everything you send is sent through the network you are connected to. That network may or may not store any or all of the data sent and received during this time. Be wary when using public hotspots, it could be someone phishing for your information.

Your phone can start recording at any time, whether it is taking photos, capturing video or just the microphone. Anything from a glitch in the system to you bumping the buttons or touch screen can send unwanted information anywhere.

One of the scariest, and least likely things your phone is capable of is remote targeting. You have seen in the movies where someone points a device at something and calls in an airstrike or a missile? All that device is doing is giving off radio waves that are reflecting off the target, effectively ‘painting’ it. Your cell phone is constantly sending and receiving radio waves and those can be use for pin point accuracy.

So now that you know exactly what your phone is capable of is it worth it to own one? While the inherent risks are many and the opportunity to be exploited grows with ever advancing technology, simple steps and constant vigilance can make you less of a target. Simply know what you are using, verify the needs of applications, do not buy second hand phones, do not sell your old phone and if your phone has a locking code or pattern, use it. Your phone is not safe if you leave it wide open. Finally, if you are not planning on using the phone, don’t just turn it off, remove the battery. The best hacker and the nosiest government can’t access a device with out power to it.