No, it’s definitely not safe—not for everyone, and certainly not for the most technologically vulnerable among us.
A couple of days ago a neighbor and friend of mine, a retired nurse in her early eighties, dropped by with a frustrating problem she was having with her iPhone. She handed it to me and said “I can’t get into it. My face doesn’t unlock it any more. It says I need a password.”
When I activated the screen, a message appeared that the phone could not be unlocked for another 15 minutes. This was bad news, really bad news. It meant that she’d already entered the wrong password at least eight times.
(When security settings on iPhones are properly configured, they will lock permanently after ten failed attempts to unlock them with a password. The warning that this is about to happen is the increasing delay that the phone requires between each failed attempt after the fifth to unlock it.)
As gently, and as non-technically as I could, I explained the peril that she could be in. She could be facing not only data loss, but even a permanently locked phone as well. I asked her if she was sure what her password was. She said no, she hadn’t thought she’d needed one, just her face, but she believed it could be her brother’s birthday. “That’s unlikely to be right,” I told her, “Your brother’s birthday can be entered as either six digits or eight digits. This wants seven.” I showed her the screen with the seven dots showing where the password was to be entered.
I then explained to her that according to an Apple support document, which I printed out and handed to her, we might be able to use her Apple Account password to erase the phone, unlock it and restore her data from a backup. I asked her if she had a backup. She said she didn’t think so. I asked her if she knew her Apple Account password. She said she didn’t have an Apple Account, not that she was aware of anyway.
At this point she was both confused and frustrated, and I was fresh out of expertise. I told her that at that point her best was to call Apple suppport. I asked her if the locked phone was her only phone. “Yes,” she replied. Did she want to use my phone to call Apple? No, she had other things she needed to do, and she didn’t have the time, so we said our good-byes and she left.
I haven’t heard from her since. I’m going to try texting her and calling her later today, but it may well be that I’ll have to go knock on her door to see if she’s got the problem sorted. I’m worried, of course, but since I’ve apparently gone from helpful techie neighbor to the prophet of technological doom, I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t slam the door in my face.
My question to the prophets of the digital revolution is this: How many times a day around the world does a dance like this take place? Will adoption of these new technologies only proceed, as the witticism about scientific progress has it, one funeral at a time? Maybe in the grand scheme of things, these agonies can’t be entirely eliminated, but it would certainly be helpful if the ones steering us along the road to the future would pull over just for a moment and devote a little more effort to harm reduction among the more vulnerable of our citizens.