Gadgetory

our mobile devices are becoming more and more important in our everyday lives we use them to store everything from credentials for social media to our email and chat services not only that some of us even use them as our everyday wallet I'm Joe Levi for pocket now here are a few ways that you can secure your Android powered device from unauthorized users this is my Nexus 4 I'm rooted and I'm running CyanogenMod 10.2 nightly which is Android 4.3 so yours may be slightly different I'll show you some of the features that this has that yours may not what you're looking at here is my lock screen shows me how many notifications I have some signal status battery strength who my carrier is and a lock screen widget in this case the time and the date what my battery charges and whatnot now I can slide to unlock and with this one I can slide it and just unlock it to my home screen unlock its messaging to music to my dialer or right over to the web just with a simple swipe and that's not just me that's anyone so if I want to go right over here there's my home screen and I'm in there's really no security to this it's just kind of keeping me from accidentally dialing someone on accident or going through messing up who knows what just by having it in your pocket and getting inadvertent screen taps so let's go ahead and see what real security options we have I'm going to pull down the notification tray there and go into settings we'll scroll down to security now yours may look a little bit different than this depending on what version of Android you're using if it's HTC vs samsung vs. LG or whatnot so take this information as a starting point just know that yours may be a little bit different this is what we're focusing on right now it is the screen lock and there's lots of different things that you can use here you can do none which means you turn the power on and it's on you don't have that accidental but dial protection like I showed you with the slide to unlock which is the next one so here is my slide that's all it does no options you just select it there it is next one up is face unlock we're going to come to that in just a minute pattern pattern is a really really nice feature you basically get a series of dots on your screen you connect the dots and if you get the pattern right it unlocks your device your pattern can be relatively simple it can be very complex it's up to you the default is a three by three pattern some devices will let you do a four by four and as you can tell this version of CyanogenMod lets me do a six by six that's crazy so let's do a five by five you can see how many dots we've got here we'll go ahead and draw a pattern and I'm just going to do something basic and hopefully I can remember this you set it up once you come back in here you see I've forgotten already how I don't remember where that was tells me that I didn't get that pattern correct so let's go back we're going to start all over again come back in here we're going to do a pattern we're going to do five by five I'm just going to come in here do that way just like that continue that way just like that obviously not a very secure pattern but maybe a little bit more secure than just a 3x3 you can see how many more dots that I've got will confirm that there we go everything's awesome we'll turn that off I've got a little bit of a timer set so it's not going to lock for about 10-15 seconds so we'll just pass some time here and then turn it back on there is now our pattern so we can do stuff like that that's not it we can do this that's not it either and eventually it's going to lock us out this is a very basic way of keeping people that aren't authorized to use your device from using your device and still let you do that now there are some options that you can use here on your pattern you can make the pattern visible which is a default or make it not visible so people looking over your shoulder are not going to be able to see what you're doing if you want to see the pattern error like you saw there where I scribbled on the screen and it showed me no this is actually what you swipe to not the correct pattern but something else that's what that does I like having that on just because sometimes it's nice to know where you thought you were going and what it actually did show pattern dots again this may vary based on your device so if you don't want to see the dots at all there you go and then automatically lock five seconds after sleep so I told you it was like 10 or 15 it was really only five and if you want the power button to automatically lock you can do that versus just having the screen timeout if you want the power button not to instantly lock and have it fall back to this five seconds right there that's what that is for next up is arguably a little bit more secure and to get to it we're going to have to put in our previous security to change it now that in itself is some security but if you've forgotten your pattern for example it's going to be a little bit interesting so the next thing we want to do is a pin pin is very simple we're going to do one two three four that sounds like the combination that somebody would have on their luggage we're going to go ahead and continue we'll put the code in again again not very secure here we'll say okay there we go power off we've got to wait that obligatory five seconds and then we'll turn it back on and it's asking us for the pin one two three four and then enter next up is a password we're going to choose our password as pocket now and hopefully I spelled that right because I can't look at the camera in the screen all that well but if not will I see ID I don't even know where I am because I'm trying to type and talk at the same time see ket in o/w okay and if I got a right with great I didn't so let's cancel out of that let's set it up again do that really fast we'll choose a shorter password how about just now for the fun of it now is too short let's do cleat that out we'll do pocket now again and o/w just like that ock e t and o w okay so there we go now we've got that set up when we turn it back on I'm going to turn this so it's a little bit easier for me to get to didn't wait the full five seconds so it's throwing me right back in that's a nice feature by the way I really like that where you can set your time out your screen time out turn it on now we'll go ahead and put this in here you can see I do not have my swipe to complete I have to manually key it in which is not a bad thing it just takes a little bit more time to do and done nope that wasn't it because I fat-fingered it now you're noticing the letters are showing up here so someone looking over your shoulder could see what your password is and just kind of figure it out you may not want to do that so keep that in mind next up is one of my more favorite now to get to that again we've got to put in the previous password and that is face unlock now this isn't going to work all that great with the camera will do the best that we can I use this all the time you've got to use it in conjunction with a pin or a pattern just in case your face isn't working so once you come in here set it up it gives you a quick tutorial hold it at eye level we're not going to be able to do that so I'll just do this and maybe you can see that you've got this ring of green that comes all the way around and it's doing some facial recognition you'll also see how we got those errors popping up and down it doesn't like it because I'm talking and I'm moving so what we're going to do here's that pin or pattern we'll do a pattern we'll do a three by three and we're just going to do that because it's simple it's going to ask for that again now if it doesn't recognize you you're going to have to put in your pattern to be able to do it so let's go back in here next thing you're going to want to do is improve face matching record a couple of these guys if you often have some scruff on your face you'll definitely want to do this with and without scruff do it in different lighting do it holding the camera at different ways I like doing it in the car and doing it at work so that in each one of those different areas it kind of knows who I am I'm going to try and hold still a little bit here while it recognizes me and the more of these that you put in there the faster it's going to get at unlocking your device so very very simple we don't want the pattern visible we're going to do the same five seconds yada-yada-yada I'm going to turn this back on for brevity and I'm going to show you this here in just a minute so let's go ahead and turn that off it should have instantly locked now I'll turn it back on it warms up the camera looks at me and just like that I'm in that actually took a little bit longer than normal because of the lighting and the way it's working here on the camera usually it's a lot faster to unlock than that and if it doesn't unlock you just put your pattern in and everything's fine now one thing one easy way to overcome this security measure is with a picture if someone has a picture of your face and holds it up in front of the camera it will unlock because all it's doing is checking to make sure that that face matches whether the face is actually on your head or in a picture it doesn't care that's where this comes in this a liveliness check so we'll go ahead and check that we'll lock everything up we'll turn it back on it's going to try and recognize us and it's going to make us blink and it didn't see us blink so now it's going to ask for the password we'll go back in turn that off turn that back on again this is where lighting is very important and again didn't catch the blink I don't have much success with blinking I don't know if it's me or not but let me rephrase that I can blink just fine I have a hard time with this detecting my blinks so we're going to turn that off just be advised that if you are turning the liveliness check off you're adding a little bit of extra ease to someone's task if they want to try and break into your device so as you can see setting up some very simple security on your Android power device is not that difficult and it doesn't add that much inconvenience to your day routine the inconvenience that you do have although slight is definitely much more convenient than having all of your social media and maybe even your wallet stolen and used by anyone out there who would have access to an unlocked device if you liked what you saw here please give the video a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to our channel already please do so so you can keep up to date on tips tricks solutions reviews news and so much more for pocket now I'm at Joe Levi on Twitter thanks for watching we'll see you next time