If you’re a reasonably connected person—not geek, person—your smartphone is the gateway to your life. It provides access to your bank accounts and other financial information, your on-line shopping accounts, your contacts, your email and chat history, and all other manner of things that you’d prefer to keep private.
It’s ironic then, that our smartphones are generally the poorest protected of our devices. Almost all of them are protected by a four digit pin. That’s bad enough but it gets worse: ten percent of those pins are 1234.
Back in the flip phone era, none of this mattered. Even if we bothered with a pin, no one would care enough to try to break it. Things are much different now. As I say, if someone can discover your pin and get access to your phone, they will have access to your life and could easily leave it in shambles.
The best solution is to use longer—or even alphanumeric—pins but if you insist on a a short pin, at least choose one that’s not trivially easy to guess. The above link takes you to a site that plots pins by their popularity. The graph is wonderfully informative. You can see the popular pins and, in many cases, why they are popular.
Again, your best strategy is to choose a longer pin and set your phone to delete your data after 10 or so failed attempts to enter it. If you must use a 4 digit pin, use the above site to choose one that won’t be guessable within 10 tries.