Your Phone Is Stolen. Your Laptop Gets Lost. Here's What to Do.

New York Times

3 days ago

Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter
By Dave Gershgorn
Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. Updated June 26, 2025
On a humid August night in Ferguson, Missouri, about 10 years ago, my phone was stolen.
I was working as a photojournalist covering the protests against Michael Brown's killing, and amidst the bustle of the packed street, my phone was snatched out of my lap. I chased after the thief, but as we made a turn off the boulevard, and the streetlights grew sparse, I gave up. My phone was gone.
That had never happened to me before, and I felt completely lost. I was far from my home in New York, I had no way to communicate with my family and friends and no way to get up-to-date information about what was happening around me, and I didn't have my saved travel plans or airline ticket home — or even any music. And suddenly all of that information was in someone else's hands.
After I returned home, I bought a new phone and set it up from scratch. I still had my photos and contact data saved in Apple's iCloud, but to this day, I don't know everything I might have lost.
A decade later, it's much easier to recover a phone — and all the personal information on it. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each built location-tracking services, which allow you to track your device's last known location on a map in real time. Google added an AI-powered feature to Android phones that is designed to detect when your device has been snatched and locks the phone screen to make it harder for a thief to access your data.
Although these tools give you options if your device is stolen, they don't ensure that your data is completely protected. Dave Lewis, global chief information security officer at identity security company 1Password, told Wirecutter that the average criminal might not be able to circumvent facial recognition or a fingerprint reader and will most likely flip the device to someone else for parts.
'But for an attacker with any sort of technical savvy, if they have physical access to the device, it's game over,' Lewis said.
Today, I would do things differently, taking a few steps before my device is stolen as well as after. This is what I'd do. Explore all articles
1. Enable your device's Find My device-tracking tool. Finding your phone is easier if you have its Find My location-tracking feature enabled. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have versions of this tool, which allows you to locate your device on a map, display a message on its lock screen, or play a sound on it remotely so that you can try to find it if it's nearby. We also recommend turning on a feature in iOS called Stolen Device Protection, which requires the person unlocking your phone to verify their identity with Face ID or Touch ID, wait an hour, and then verify again before being able to change sensitive information such as account passwords. Google has made a similar feature, called Identity Check, available for some Android phones.
2. Set your device to automatically create backups. Unless the phone's data is backed up, security experts told us that it's nearly impossible for the average person to retrieve information from their phone once it's already lost or stolen. If your phone is lost or stolen, you'll still be able to access data on Instagram or even your to-do list app, since most apps store information in the cloud and send it to your phone when you need it. But all the little things that make your phone yours, such as your settings and backgrounds, the way you arrange your apps, and anything you might have saved locally in your Files app, can be saved only if you've backed them up beforehand.
Both iOS and Android let you schedule regular automatic backups of all your apps and settings, which is absolutely essential. If you have a recent copy of your backup and don't need any of the information on the phone, you can remotely wipe all the data off it without losing too much. Otherwise, you're stuck trying to find and recover your phone.
3. Encrypt and back up your laptop. It can be particularly challenging to recover data from a stolen or lost laptop, since you're far more likely to have saved files to its hard drive rather than storing them in the cloud. By encrypting your hard drive, which is an option in both macOS and Windows, you can prevent attackers from extracting that data with their own tools if they don't have your password. We also recommend backing up your important files to an external hard drive that you store in a safe location, so you can recover your photos and documents even if your laptop is gone for good.
4. Use a password manager. A password manager is an essential service that we recommend to improve your online security. (We recommend 1Password or Bitwarden.) It works by creating and autofilling unique passwords for all of your accounts, and in turn you need to remember and safeguard only the master password to the password manager. Your data stays encrypted until the master password is entered, and you can deauthorize the device if it's stolen or lost to remove the potential of your passwords being accessed altogether.
5. Turn off message previews and lock Control Center access. If anyone looking at your phone can see messages as they pop up, that means thieves can also see two-factor authentication codes. That gives the thief an opportunity to crack into any accounts that send you a code when you log in. iOS and Android both give you the ability to hide message previews until your phone recognizes your face. (If you mark your phone as lost in the Find My feature, that automatically turns off message previews remotely.)
You can also turn off certain features of the lock screen, such as the Control Center, which gives quick access to Wi-Fi and other settings, until the phone has been unlocked by facial recognition.
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Prevention, as they say, is the best cure, but life doesn't always unfold so neatly. If your phone, tablet, or laptop gets lost or stolen right this moment, don't panic. Here are the things you should do.
1. If your device was stolen, report the theft. Immediately after your device is taken, report it stolen to the police. If the missing device is a phone, report it to your cell carrier. Many carriers require you to give a previously established PIN to verify your identity and will then freeze your number (for more details, see information from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) until you add a new phone. The carrier will then block the old phone's unique serial number from connecting to its network.
2. Remotely lock down the device. If you enabled the Find My feature prior to the loss or theft, both Apple and Google give you options to remotely lock down your device. For an iPhone, you can visit Find Devices and mark the item as lost. For an Android phone, navigate to the Secure device setting in Google's location-tracking tool. Locking down the device makes it harder for thieves to access your Google account, pay using saved cards, or see alerts.
3. Revoke access to apps and remove multi-factor authentication. If a thief has your phone and is able to unlock it somehow, you should limit their ability to receive one-time passwords for your bank, for instance, or use applications that are permanently logged in. We recommend removing your phone as a multi-factor authentication device if you haven't turned off message previews as recommended above, if you have an easy-to-guess password, or if your cell phone line isn't frozen yet. Ronnie Manning, chief brand advocate for security key maker Yubico, separately recommends making a list of your most sensitive accounts, such as Google or Facebook accounts that you use to log in to other accounts, and then revoke your device from those accounts if it's stolen. You can usually find these settings under names like 'Account Access' or 'Security.'
4. Erase the device. With the Find My feature enabled before loss or theft, both Apple and Google will allow you to wipe data such as apps and photos from your stolen or lost phone while still being able to track it. Note that you should only wipe the device's data using the Find My feature, not fully remove the device from your Apple or Google account — that would allow the thief to set it up as new.
Now, it's time to get a new phone or laptop. Luckily, we have some recommendations.
This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.