How does it feel to have someone access your phone when you are not around? Worst still, you have no record of the person who meddles with your phone. redHanded is one such app for Android that allows you to capture a snapshot of the intruder and catch them red-handed.
redHanded works only with Android phone or tablet that has a front-facing camera. When armed, redHanded will silently start taking shots at predefined intervals through your mobile’s front facing camera each time it’s unlocked. The shots taken will be conveniently saved to your gallery with the current time-stamp allowing you to identify who was messing with your mobile and when.
Download redHanded from the Android market (the app costs $0.99, but there is a free trial version that you can download).
Run the app. There are a few options that you can configure. You can change the Abort key, which is a 4-digits number to abort the camera shooting sequence.
You can also configure the shooting mode (standard shooting or capture from Preview), shooting interval (1, 3 or 5 seconds) and maximum number of shots (5, 10 or 15 shots).
A good thing is that all the captured images are labelled with the current time-stamp so you know when your phone was accessed.
Conclusion
This is definitely not the best security app in the market. If you have locked your phone and your apps, people shouldn’t be able to access your phone. Some features to include in this app would be the ability to upload the images to Dropbox, or Google+ (though you already can do that with the Dropspace and Google+ respectively) and a geo-location tag for the images.
In addition, this type of app belongs to the “set it and leave it” type, so once armed, most people will forget to deactivate it after unlocking their phone. What happens is there will be plenty of your own picture in the redhanded folder. It would be great if there is an option to remove the images after certain interval (say 30 days), so the RedHanded folder won’t be filled with images after a while.
What do you think? Is such an app useful for you?
redHanded (market link)
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.
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