GoKawiilRita El Khoury / Android Authority
SIM cards are often forgotten yet essential pieces of our smartphones. They allow devices to connect to network providers, facilitating phone calls, texting, and internet services. Sure, you can use a phone without a SIM, but it’s hardly efficient.
Given the power of these little chips, they should be secured with a PIN to prevent unauthorized use. Annoyingly, though, if you regularly restart your phone, you’ll have to input this PIN every single time. That can get tiring, and Google seems to know this.
Android 17 introduces a new feature called Automatic SIM lock protection, which will automatically enter the SIM PIN when you unlock your device.
Intrigued by this idea, we wanted to know how many of our readers secure their SIMs with PINs. We ran a poll, and here are the worrying results. We received over 1,800 votes in this poll, but the majority of respondents don’t believe securing a SIM is very important. In fact, 58.3% of voters do not have a PIN enabled on their SIM cards.
As someone who still uses a physical SIM and always secures it with a PIN, this gives me chills. If my phone were to ever fall into the wrong hands, at least my number and other mobile services wouldn’t be available to abuse.
However, some readers may forego a PIN for their eSIMs, since you can’t physically access them and you’d need the phone’s PIN to use them.
Commenter Bonny Babu Onat writes: If you are using an ESIM, I recommend to disable this feature when tracking a lost phone which require data to be active.[sic] Notably, not everyone follows this path.
Around 34% of voters secure their SIMs with a PIN, while 7.4% of respondents aren’t sure. Do you secure your SIM card with a PIN? If not, why not? Is it for convenience, or do you use an eSIM?
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