I grew up in a small town in the 1980s. My family’s home phone number and street address were published in the town’s White Pages. Friends could locate my home phone in the listing (there were less than five Powells in my small town) and call me on our rotary telephone in the kitchen. It had a small cord attaching the headset to the vertical base, which meant no privacy for calls.
Back then, I memorized my friends’ phone numbers, and committed my own phone to memory. Ten digits including area code. It was easy, almost muscle memory, to recite my home phone number to those who asked for it.
If you lived during the time before cellular mobile phones, you probably have your home’s landline phone memorized…even to this day. That 10-digit number from the past would be an outstanding PIN code for your mobile phone.
Even if we are using TouchID or FaceID to unlock our mobile phones, we still need to enter a PIN code in case these two authentication methods fail. A standard four-digit PIN might be based on the month and day of your birthday, or if you are a rock music fan like me, perhaps Van Halen’s seventh album. A six-digit PIN code might also be based on your birthday or anniversary.
A 10-digit PIN code based on a phone number from your past, etched into your memory, that is nowhere to be found in online account databases, is a solid way of increasing your phone’s security, should your phone be lost or stolen.
You can update your iPhone/iPad’s PIN code with this online guide.
You can update your Android phone’s PIN code with this online guide.
Stay safe, Insiders! Thanks for your time.