Today is my last day here at Wayfinder (I’ll be gone by the time this is posted), which had me thinking about what advice I could leave behind to help someone out in the future. That is why I’m going to tell you about how I lost my iPhone over the weekend.

Losing an iPhone is almost as heartbreaking as losing a dog. I backtracked, woke people up at ungodly hours, overturned their couches, and left my name and contact information everywhere I went to that day. I almost thought about posting reward posters on telephone poles throughout SF.

I tried looking for another phone on craigslist, but I don’t have the patience and am not very trusting, so I gave up. I figured I’d just go to AT&T and pay $99 for another 3G. WRONG! The only reason I got that price was because I signed a 2-year contract. My contract wasn’t up until June of 2011. This meant I’d have to pay $499-$699 for a replacement. I refused.

Long story short, a good friend who works for Sprint hooked me up with an HTC Hero. It’s comparable, has a better camera, better sound quality than the iPhone, but isn’t as beautiful or cool, I’ll admit. The main pros though are that my monthly phone bill will be cut in half and Sprint offers me insurance so that I only pay a $100 deductible for a replacement.

Now, for the advice:

Throughout my ordeal, there were so many “woulda, coulda, shouldas.” Apple & AT&T know the iPhone is a thing of beauty, which is why they don’t care if you lose it. They don’t offer insurance because they know a lot of people will pay full price for another one. So here are some things you could do BEFORE you lose your iPhone:

1)    Get your iPhone insured. Be careful because most insurance companies won’t cover what most of us need them to, including theft, loss or accidental damage (like rain damage or dropping and cracking it). If you’re lucky enough to pin one down, the cost of the monthly fee combined with the deductible won’t even be worth it. You could end up paying the insurance company the same amount you would have to get a new iPhone.

2)    Download and subscribe to an application that will track your phone down. One of my sister’s bosses knows himself too well, so he subscribes to MobileMe ($99/year) which can pinpoint his iPhone’s location via satellite each time he loses it. It’s a good idea if, staying true to form, he drops it in the conference room and finds it a few hours later. I don’t recommend you use it to stalk and confront your thief, however.

3)    It may not be pretty, but make a wallpaper using Photoshop that gives your name and some way to contact you. If your screen locks, they won’t be able to go into your phone to find out who you are or call you, but at least they’ll be able to contact you because they still can see the wallpaper. Maybe add that you’re offering a reward. A $50-$100 reward is better than dropping another $499-$699 for a new iPhone.

If I knew what I know now, I might still be a proud owner of an iPhone. It was a lovely 8-month romance, but the high-cost replacement and large phone bill made it easier for me to walk away. Though, I’ll probably be back one day.

I’m a great proponent of privacy, which is why I often make it a habit to either block my browser from accepting cookies, or I will manually purge them every once in a while. The creep-factor alone is enough reason—such as when websites offer me products based on my browsing habits, previous orders, or my location, which unfortunately (read: disturbingly) often includes dates with single men in my area. Yes, I’m talking about you Facebook! You are worse than some of my family members.

It makes me wonder who else in cyberspace knows my personal information.

What are cookies, you ask? Cookies are small packets of data created by a web server for a web browser, which contain a user’s preferences or personal information. They are housed on the user’s computer (often without the user’s knowledge and permission) and subsequently sent back to the same server when the user accesses that same site. There has always been, and probably will always be, a debate on whether cookies are a good or bad thing.

Personally, they still make me uncomfortable. Imagine walking into work tomorrow and your coworkers are gathered around the water cooler discussing the granny panties you bought yesterday from Amazon.com. They really were for my grandma! It was her birthday!

In 2005, it seems a lot of us had those same fears, with about 40% tossing our cookies on a regular basis. Today, the trend seems to be that users recognize the perks of user-friendly websites that save you time from entering the same usernames and passwords over and over again. It makes sense—the busier our world becomes, the more efficient we need to be. Not only that, but the information that we can gather from users’ browsing habits and personal information can be important for statistical purposes and for improving sites. Even the White House proposes to lift a current cookie ban on federal websites.

The truth is, if you use a computer on a regular basis, you inadvertently give up your privacy because, really, you can’t delete all your cookies. There is an evolved breed of cookie out there called Flash cookies or Local Shared Objects (LSO) that will hide out in secret places on your hard drive and dodge browser attempts at cookie purges. They are able to do this because either these files have different extensions than the ones the browser is searching for, or because the cookie data is actually stored in a file that this browser is using and thus won’t allow for deletion. That’s scary!

Like spam, you can put as many restrictions on internet cookie usage as you want, but those cyber tricksters out there will still find a way to circumvent any obstacle. And as long as technology keeps changing, the number of ways to dodge those obstacles will only increase.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to make it a ritual to delete the cookies you can get to every now and then, especially if you share a computer. Not only do I want to keep my own business private, but I really don’t want to know yours either.

SPAM! We all know it; we all love to hate it.

The annoying thing about SPAM! is that it works. Sure a success rate of 0.000008% may sound horrible (that translates into 1 positive response out of 12,500,000 messages) but when it costs practically nothing to produce and maintain, and is hard to control, who can blame spammers?

In the first quarter of 2008, 92.3% of all email was SPAM! Wow.

And it’s not only email anymore, I’ve gotten SPAM! instant messages where I didn’t recognize the user name, so I started conversations with web bots who I was convinced were old college buddies. Ok I’ll check out your webcam. I’ve gotten SPAM! text messages too, which actually cost me money to receive until I switched to an unlimited plan.

But it’s mainly email SPAM! that bugs me the most because I deal with it on a daily basis. Thankfully, there are SPAM! filters in most email clients now. But even then, not only do a few SPAM! emails sneak by using my own email address as the sender, Canadian pill-pushers are getting smarter, but I find I still have to re-filter through these SPAM! folders for those few legitimate emails that get channeled to the wrong place. I swear, I never got your email! Sigh.

And now, some fun SPAM! facts for your Friday:

• Have you ever wondered where the term SPAM! for junk mail came from? It’s from a 1970 Monty Python skit. Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

• Read this blog to see how SPAM! went from a name of a tasty mysterious meat to a name for unwanted digital solicitation: http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html

• The mystery meat known as SPAM! is a mystery no longer. The ingredients:

- Chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat
- Salt (for binding, flavor, and firmness)
- Water (to help mixing)
- Sugar
- Sodium Nitrite (for color and to act as a preservative)

Sources:

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=6056

http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/11/spam-security-email-tech-security-cz_bs_1212spam.html?partner=whiteglove_google

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/independent/2008/11/cyberclinic-spa.html

http://www.cusd.claremont.edu/~mrosenbl/spamfacts.html