Mobile ME privacy

I was thinking about the privacy issues today when one syncs their private contact details with Mobile Me Seems like one places a copy of all their private stuff on their server. So if you have bank details or any other private stuff all that is now available for others to see (If needed of course).

 

MobileMe stores pretty much what I have on my iPhone (except for some additional iDisk stuff). I keep my iPhone password protected and have the wipe feature turned on. MobileMe is pretty secure with a username and password required to access and just like on my Mac I keep anything really sensitive (like financial info, any access codes etc) encrypted using a utility like Yojimbo.

I've seen more secure remote data sites where everything is stored encrypted and the service never sees anything unencrypted and has no access to the encryption keys but for most folks the level of security MobileMe provides should be adequate.

 

So if you use Yojimbo then they don't have access to those contacts in your contact file??

 

I don't put sensitive information in my contacts or any other program on my machine other than Yojimbo, Instead I put all my really sensitive information only in Yojimbo and encrypt it.

Yojimbo knows how to sync with MobilleMe so you have a backup there or sync to other computers you have. That means for anyone to get a look at what I consider sensitive information they have to break into my MobileME account or my Mac (and I use pass phrases and security settings that make that difficult) and then they would have to crack the encryption on Yojimbo which also uses strong encryption and different even longer pass phrases.

There are many other similar programs that can do this as well, I just chose Yojimbo because it was small, simple, and extremely reliable syncing across machines. I've tried Together, VoodooPad, and many others (search for mac information manager encrypt on google)

 

how do you enable this wipe feature you speak of?

 

On the iPhone or iPod Touch you can set it to erase the storage if after a certain amount of attempts of the wrong password.

 

Preferences, General, Password Lock, EraseData=on

This will erase all data on your iPhone after 10 failed passwords. The data will still be on your Mac and/or Mobileme so you can easily sync it back to a recovered or new iPhone.