Hold your phone for a moment without unlocking it.
Inside it: your email, which is where the reset link for every other account you own arrives. Your photographs. Your messages with your children. Your bank, or the app that opens your bank. Card details saved into a shop you bought from once, in 2019, and haven’t thought about since.
Now picture it face down on a café table, and you two streets away before you notice.
That’s the whole subject here — not the calls or the strangers with a story, but the object itself, and what could be opened in the twenty minutes before you get back to the café.
The answer turns almost entirely on settings. Ones you either changed once, years ago, or have never seen.
The phone changed jobs
It’s still called a phone, which is generous. A phone was a thing you talked into, and losing one meant losing the ability to talk into it.
This is a key ring.
On it is your email, and email is the master key, because email is where you send yourself a new password when you’…