Alexander Fokin MySecrets v2.1Special Thanks To vukaikt@DSPDAThe cellphone a long time ago became more than just phone. A modern smartphone often contains so much personal and important information that its hard to say what is worse loose a phone or a wallet.
Financial loses is not so important in such case. Very often the discovery of some private information that is stored in the phone can recall with great troubles for the phone owner.
I will not bother the ethical side of this question, but how many quarrels appear because of discover of some contacts or messages in the intimate person phone?
And what gossips can appear on job if someone by accident will see private photos on the colleagues cellphone?
The
MySecrets application allows you to set up the password for most important applications.
It allows limit the access to contacts, messages and other private information that is stored in your phone.
Now you could not afraid of leave your cellphone on the table in the office or forget it at home. One more cause for family scandals just was lost.
Right away after installing and launching the application you have to set it up.
Protect applicationthis setting controls overall application work. If it is activated then access to the selected applications will be limited.
Passwordhere the cash dispenser concept is used. The pin code combined of the four numerals.
Why so little? Why just numbers? In the first version the password could contain the letters not just numerals and its size was limited with 64 symbols.
But the using experience of this application had shown that users value not only protection but also the quick access to locked applications. In this case nobody will not set too long and hard password.
So we have decided to limit password to a 4 numerals. No one have any troubles with cash dispensers usage, isnt it?
User inactivity intervalthis parameter defines the period of the time after the expiration of which the access to applications will be blocked.
Moreover in this period you should not do anything with your phone. This concept is like the screensaver.
There is the time period let us say one minute. If on the 58th second you will press any key the time will countdown from the start (the screensaver will dont appear). It allows avoiding the continual password input to access applications.
When the phone is resting more than defined time period applications will be blocked and you will have to enter the password again.
Unlock actioncontrols the unlocking behavior. After password entering all the selected apps can be unlocked (that is logical because the person who is taking the phone in hand knows the password and it has no particular sense to ask it password again after few seconds when this person is trying gain access to other application) or just that application for which this person have tried to gain access.
Password attemptshere we have the cash dispenser concept again. We have short and not difficult password so we must exclude attempt to password fitting.
Do not disregard this option. After defined attempts count on the incorrect password input the access to the applications will be completely blocked (without ability to enter the password anymore).
Also access to the
MySecretsapplications settings will be blocked. This can be useful to determine that somebody have tried to fit in the password and make corresponding decisions.
Incorrect pass block timedefines the time period onto which the access to selected applications will be completely locked if tries of incorrect password input count will be exceeded.
Now that is time to select applications for which you want to limit the access. This can be made on the next tab.
The great work was done to analyze all applications that are preinstalled in the phones.
The most of them are system services and they will never demand for blocking (they have not any interface and they are not interacting with the user). Moreover their list differs on different phones models.
You can see these system services in any other application that has ability to show the installed applications list. Can common user understand what AknCapsServer.exe name means?
In general the application list in the MySecrets application hold twice less items than other rival apps.
As result we have fine structured list that is filled with really useful information.
You can search desired application by name. The list of already selected applications is shown separately.
The application is set up. Desired apps are selected. What we should do next?
Close the app and continue to live our common life.
When phone goes into the standby mode (and when defined time period is expired) you should enter the password to access selected apps.
The password is required to access the MySecrets application (so someone who doesnt know the password couldnt change the settings or turn the application off).
There are little additions for everything that was said before.
The application will not block the data in the phone itself. It will lock only the access to the apps which could show this data.
So if you want to block access to the SMS messages you should not only block the
Messaging app but all the side applications (if there are any installed) that is used to work with SMS. This feature should not be ignored.
I strictly recommend you to block the
Installer. It will allow to exclude case of unauthorized uninstalling of the
MySecretsapplication (the effect of this is evident), and also the installation of the side applications that can be used by intruder to get access to the important data bypassing locked applications.
Also there is a sense to lock standard and all the side file managers. All such applications can provide access to the private multimedia content on the file system level.
In some cases applications when you enter correct password cannot provide you full-fledged work process continuation.
For example, the
Messaging application is locked. You have received new message so you will press
View.
MySecrets will block launch of the
Messaging application but it cant know that you just wanted to view the concrete message.
As result after entering the password you have to view this message by manually starting the
Messaging application (in this case you havent to enter the password again).
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