Norton Mobile Security

[gottoknow]

Both Norton and Lookout say their product will enable you to remote wipe your phone and your SD memory card.  I switched from Lookout to NMS when I found out that Lookout will only wipe your phone’s SD card if you have pressed their “Enable GPS Location” button requiring that you manually turn on full time the standalone GPS services on your phone (where you get the warning about “access by any third party” and “could pose certain risks to users of this device”)!  If you only have your basic location service on, Lookout will wipe only your phone, not your SD card.

In a Norton Community forum on NMS/Norton Anti-Theft/GPS/Battery Drain, I found this statement, “GPS should only be used when the device is reported lost. When not in lost mode, it should use basic location services without actually invoking GPS” (Erik, Technical Product Manager, Symantec Corporation).  This would seem to indicate that standalone GPS does not have to be manually turned on to initiate a remote wipe of the phone and the SD card.

I need confirmation that (a) NMS/Anti-Theft will wipe my SD card, as well as my phone, when I have only enabled my basic location service, “Google Location Services”, and (b) that I do not have to manually enable my “Standalone GPS Services” to perform the actual wipe of the SD card.

Thanks for the help.  (Droid2 Global, Android version 2.3.4)

[smithy Super Virus Trouncer Mobile Master (Norton Mobile Users Discussion Forum)]

Hi gottoknow

Welcome to the Norton Community Forums.

Appologies for the blank post to start with.

The NMS Anti-Theft feature being the remote command to wipe your device only

requires a network signal to be able to send the SMS message required to wipe

the following-

Text Messages. Contacts, Call History, Browser History, Bookmarks and any data

stored on your phones memory card.

GPS and Location settings have no effect on the remote SMS Wipe command for

NMS as far as i know.

Some interesting info from the link below for NMS SMS Remote Commands-

NMS SMS Anti-Theft Features

Hope that helps.

Cheers.

EDIT- Fix post from Moto Xoom.

[smithy Super Virus Trouncer Mobile Master (Norton Mobile Users Discussion Forum)]

Hi again

Using both network and GPS location services in the device settings would be

very handy if using the NMS Anti-Theft feature SMS command Remote Locate.

Using both GPS and network location would be a lot more accurate in finding the

position of a lost or stolen device. :-)

Cheers.

[erik_carlstrom · Accepted solution]

If you send the wipe command via SMS, NAT will wipe the SD card.  If you have more than one SD card there may be an issue, but we do try to address most devices with this configuration.  Another is if  the SD card is mounted to /mnt/sdcard2/ and you do not have write permissions to it (usually occurs on Android 3.2 and up).