Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech, Second Edition

Leverage your smartphone and smartwatch for improved personal safety!

Version 2.0, updated November 12,2025

The digital and “real” worlds can both be scary places. The smartphone (and often smartwatch) you already carry with you can help reduce risks, deter theft, and mitigate violence. This book teaches you to secure your hardware, block abuse, automatically call emergency services, connect with others to ensure you arrive where and when you intended, detect stalking by compact trackers, and keep your ecosystem accounts from Apple, Google, and Microsoft secure.

You don’t have to be reminded of the virtual and physical risks you face every day. Some of us are targeted more than others. Modern digital features built into mobile operating systems (and some computer operating systems) can help reduce our anxiety by putting more power in our hands to deter, deflect, block, and respond to abuse, threats, and emergencies.

Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech looks at both digital threats, like online abuse and account hijacking, and ones in the physical world, like being stalked through Bluetooth trackers, facing domestic violence, or being in a car crash. The book principally covers the iPhone, Apple Watch, Android devices, and Wear OS watches. It also covers more limited but useful features available on the iPad and on computers running macOS or Windows.

This second edition incorporates the massive number of new safety features Google added since October 2024 to the Android operating system, some particular to Google Pixel phones and smartwatches, and improved blocking, filtering, and screening added to Apple’s iOS 26 and related operating system updates in fall 2025.

This book explores many techniques to help:

• Learn how to harden your Apple Account, Google Account, and Microsoft Account beyond just a password or a text-message token.

• Discover filtering and blocking tools from Apple and Google that can prevent abusive, fraudulent, and phishing messages and calls from reaching you.

• Block seeing unwanted sensitive images on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or Android phone—and help your kids receive advice on how not to send them.

• Turn on tracking on your Apple, Google, and Microsoft devices, and use it to recover or erase stolen hardware.

• Keep your cloud-archived messages from leaking to attackers.

• Screen calls with an automated assistant so that you know who wants you before picking up and without sending to voicemail.

• Lock down your devices to keep thieves and other personal invaders from accessing them.

• Prepare for emergencies by setting up medical information on your mobile devices.

• Let a supported smartphone or smartwatch recognize when you’re in a car crash or have taken a hard fall and call emergency services for you (and text your emergency contacts) if you can’t respond.

• Keep track of heart anomalies through smartwatch alerts and tests on your Apple Watch and many Android Wear smartwatches.

• Tell others where or when you expect to check in with them again, and let your smartphone alert them if you don’t with your Apple iPhone or Android phone.

• Deter stalking from tiny Bluetooth trackers.

• Protect your devices and accounts against access from domestic assailants.

• Block thieves who steal your phone—potentially threatening you or attacking you in person—from gaining access to the rest of your digital life.