How To Secure Your iPhone Before Handing It To Someone

If you need to hand your iPhone to a ticket checker, cashier, security guard, or police officer to show a document or your ID, be sure to use Guided Access first, to lock the iPhone into that one app and restrict access. You can also use Guided Access to allow children to play games on your iPhone or iPad.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use guided access on your iPhone or iPad so you can securely hand your device to somebody else to let them see something or use it.
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So sometimes when you're using your iPhone or iPad we need to hand it to somebody else who we may not trust. Maybe we don't trust them because we don't know them. It could be somebody in a store. They need to see a receipt or some sort of payment information on your iPhone. Maybe it's a child that wants to play a game or view some photos and you don't want them getting into anything else on your device. Or maybe it's a security guard or police officer and you want to show them identification in an official app. You need to hand the phone over to them but you don't want to hand it to them completely unlocked. So there's a feature on the iPhone to handle this. You'll find it in the Settings App. Go to Accessibility and then go all the way to the bottom and you'll find Guided Access. Go in there and turn it on.
Now to set this up first go to Passcode Settings. Here you can set a Guided Access Passcode. This is a passcode you need to get out of this mode. You could set it here or the first time you use this it will ask you to set it. You could also turn on Face ID or Touch ID here. This allows you to exit using Face ID or Touch ID which makes it a lot more convenient to use because you could easily get out of this mode. Here you can set whether or not this appears in the Accessibility Shortcut. You want to have that turned on. Here you could set a Custom Time for your iPhone to lock when using this mode. So maybe you have your iPhone set to lock after two minutes normally. But maybe when using this mode you want it to lock only after one minute. 
So let's look at how to use this. You can't use it here in the Settings App and you can't use it here on the Home Screen. So it can be frustrating to try to use it if you're in one of these modes where Guided Access doesn't work. To activate this use the Triple Click which will activate the Accessibility Shortcut. So I'm going to press 3 times on the side button. This brings up the Accessibility Shortcut and you could see here Guided Access isn't listed. That's because I'm on the Home Screen. So it's important to realize that. When you're in the Settings App or on the Home Screen and a few other places you can't use Guided Access because you're not inside an App. Guided Access locks you in an App. If you're not in an App then Guided Access doesn't even make any sense. So don't get frustrated if you don't see it there. 
Instead go into an App. Now you may want to go into the Apple Wallet. You may want to go into an email message or a browser page or whatever it is you need to show the other person. Maybe if it's a child wanting to use your device you're going to want to go into the game that they're going to play. As an example here I'm going to use the Photos App. Let's say you're handing it to somebody and you want them to be able to look through your photos to see some pictures. You don't want them to leave the Photos App. So you go into Photos. Now that you're inside an app this will work. If I triple click the side button you could see now Guided Access is now an option. Let's turn it On. 
Now the first time you turn it On it's going to ask you for more options here. So at the bottom we've got Options. You could specify exactly what they could do. Now if you turn off things like Touch then they won't actually be able to do much of anything. They can't even move around to the next picture here on the Photos App. So depending upon what you want to do you may want to have that On or Off. If the idea is you want to use it so you can hand your phone to somebody so they could see a receipt or ticket then you might want to turn all this stuff off and they really can't do anything on the screen. If the idea is you want to use this to hand your iPhone to a child so they could play a game or look through photos, then of course you want to leave Touch On so they could actually do things inside the app. You could also set a time limit here if you want. So if you're handing over the iPhone or iPad to a child they can then play the game for 5 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. Then the iPhone will Lock and they have to come back to you for help.
Now in addition to that you can also circle areas of the screen that you want to disable. So, for instance, if you wanted to disable the Back button here you could do that. Or the Edit button here you could do that by circling. Now let's start. Because we didn't provide a passcode it's going to ask us, but only this first time. Of course you should use a real passcode. Something you will not forget. Perhaps the same as the passcode you use for your iPhone in general especially if nobody else but you knows that. Now you've started Guided Access. Now here notice that I've got no Home button indicator here at the bottom. I can't go Home. If I've got a physical Home button it won't actually work. There's no way for me to get to another app. I'm locked here in the Photos App. But since I allowed Touch I can still navigate in the Photos App. 
Now let's say I want to exit. I can do that one of two ways. One is to triple click the side button again. This brings up the Accessibility Shortcut and I can turn Off Guided Access. It's going to ask me for the password and I can Exit. Then it takes me back to this screen here where I can End Guided Access, Resume It, or Change the Options when you circle new areas. So let's End. Now the second time I do this, since I've already set a password and you've already set Options, all I need to do is triple click to get to the Accessibility Shortcut. Turn On Guided Access and it instantly goes on. If I want to change the Options I can triple click, turn it Off. I've got to enter the password again and now I'm in this mode where I can change Options. 
Now if you want quick In and Out you can turn it On with the Accessibility Shortcut like this and it will go on instantly. Now remember we checked that Face ID was okay to use to exit. You could use Touch ID for that as well. So instead of triple pressing the side button, just double press it and it's going to use Face ID to get out. So you can see I exited it without going through the Options. So you can get out of Guided Access really quickly that way. 
Getting into Guided Access even quicker takes some forethought. One thing that you could do is in Settings if you go to the Accessibility Shortcut, which is here at the bottom, and you uncheck everything except Guided Access then triple clicking should take you directly into Guided Access. But if you wanted some of these other things to be there like Zoom and Magnifier which are really handy, then you're always going to have to go to that Menu and choose Guided Access. There is some information online about using Siri to get into Guided Access. As far as I can tell in iOS 15 Siri won't do that. 
Now there is the really handy Back Tap. If you go into Touch, go to Back Tap you can set a double tap or triple tap. You tap on the back of your phone and it will do something. So, for instance, I could set Triple Tap to be Accessibility Shortcut, that's handy. You'd then think I would be able to choose Guided Access under Accessibility and be able to Triple Tap on the back of my phone to get into Guided Access. But it's not listed. However, it doesn't mean that you can't do it because you can set Shortcuts as something to use for Triple Tap. So you can quickly create a shortcut for this to go into the Shortcuts App. I'm going to add a new shortcut. Add the action. I'm going to Search for Guided Access. You can see Start Guided Access is one of the things here. It automatically gives the name Start Guided Access here. You could actually go in here and Add to Home Screen and make a button on your Home Screen to start Guided Access. I'm going to simply Exit this. You could see Start Guided Access is right there as a shortcut. Now if I go back to Settings and I look at the Back Tap here you could see one of the options is to Start Guided Access. It's that shortcut I just created. So now Triple Tap is set to start Guided Access.
So remember I need to go into an App. I'll choose Photos again. I'm going to tap 3 times on the back of the phone. You could see it started Guided Access pretty quick. So you're about to hand your phone to somebody. You get to the right App. You do that and you hand your phone over and now when you get it back you just double press on the side button, use Face ID to end it. 
So Guided Access gives you the ability to hand your phone to somebody knowing that it's locked into the App that you're currently in or even to that screen. The important thing is that you set it up in advance. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Secure Your iPhone Before Handing It To Someone”

Dana Schwartz

2 years ago

What about Auto-Lock? My iPhone is set to lock rather quickly, and I’ve always hesitated to use it for something like a boarding pass, as I don’t know when to open the wallet or wherever BPs are stored. Will Auto-Lock kick in with Guided Access, making you have to restart it if it times out for the person you’re handing it to?

Gary Rosenzweig

Dana: You don't need to restart if it auto-locks. You just unlock it as normal.

nick

I'm constantly amazed how many features are "hidden" away in the iPhone. Thanks to you Gary for discovering them for us :)

Don

This is quite handy. I also like that I can use it for something like having my boarding pass open, and not worrying about bumping the screen and having some other application open up and covering up the screen I wanted.

Ron Housley

I'm assuming (because I can't do it) that you are not able to get Apple Pay authorized to make a payment, and then set Guided Access before handing your phone over to the Starbucks Drive-up window person to complete the transaction??? Should I be able to set up Guided Access for Apple Pay once I have authorized it to do a transaction?

Ron: Apple Pay needs you to confirm the payment with Touch ID, Face ID or your passcode. So there's no way to have it work like that. Probably not a situation where you should be handing your phone to someone anyway, right when it is set for a financial transaction like that. Starbucks doesn't need you to hand your phone anyway. I've done this at Starbucks. They hold the reader out to you.

Comments Closed.

How To Secure Your iPhone Before Handing It To Someone

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Secure Your iPhone Before Handing It To Someone”

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