Losing your phone can be a very stressful situation. Yes, there’s the monetary aspect, especially with how expensive flagship phones are these days, but there’s also the terrifying reality that your whole digital identity is now in a stranger’s hands.
Our lives, including our precious memories, our bank accounts, private conversations, home security controls, and a lot more, are all stored on our phones, and that’s precisely why losing one can spell disaster.
Google, over the years, has done a great job of ensuring that lost/stolen devices can be tracked, complete with features to ensure that your personal data remains out of threat actors’ reach.
Currently housed under ‘Personal and Device safety,’ Google’s suite of device safety features include Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock, Failed Authentication Lock, Inactivity reboot, and of course, Find My.
Now, Google is beginning to roll out a powerful set of theft protection feature updates that build upon existing protections, “designed to give you greater peace of mind by making your device a much harder target for criminals.”
Credit:Â Google
For starters, Android 15—introduced Failed Authentication Lock is now getting more granular controls. With Android 16, you should now be able to access a new dedicated enable/disable toggle for Failed Authentication Lock in settings.
Elsewhere, Identity Check now applies to more functions. Released with Android 15, Identity Check, as its name suggests, requires users to prove that they’re the actual owners of a device by successfully passing biometric authentication. Android only triggers Identity Checks when the device is outside a trusted location, and only for sensitive settings. Google wants to change that.
The tech giant has extended Identity Check to all features and apps that use the Android Biometric Prompt. “This means that critical tools that utilize Biometric Prompt, like third-party banking apps and Google Password Manager, [will] automatically benefit from the additional security of Identity Check.”
In cases where a threat actor does get access to your device in a trusted location and tries to guess your device PIN, failed tries will result in a significantly higher lockout duration. At the same time, “to ensure you aren’t locked out by mistake (by a curious child, for instance), identical incorrect guesses no longer count toward your retry limit.”
Everything else
- Remote locking a stolen device via http://android.com/lock now requires you to answer a security question. This ensures that only the real owner of the device can remotely lock it. The option to set a security question to remote lock is optional.
- Theft Detection Lock and Remote Lock will now be enabled by default for all new Android devices being activated in Brazil.
- Enhanced recovery tools for all devices running Android 10+.
Google says users should be on the lookout for even more Android theft protection updates in the near future.
