It’s bad enough if your iPhone gets lost or stolen, and worse if your personal data is also at risk. There are a few things you can do to protect your private data though. Making sure to have a strong passcode set and using the Touch ID if your iPhone has that capability is one way that will help keep your personal data saved on your iPhone from being accessed. Also, when you are setting up your passcode, you will see an option that will allow the iPhone to automatically erase all data if the passcode is entered incorrectly ten times.
Another way to protect your personal data on your iPhone in case it gets lost or stolen is to set up an iCloud account and activate the “Find My iPhone” option. This way, if your iPhone does become lost or stolen you can locate it on a map and prompt your iPhone to display a message about how to return the iPhone. You can also have your iPhone play a sound so you can see if it’s close by, set a new passcode lock or delete all of your data if you feel it is at risk.
There are also a variety of apps available through the App store that will allow you to remotely remove all the data from your iPhone. Some of these apps require subscriptions and some don’t. iCloud is free and has pretty much all the options you will need to help locate your iPhone or protect your personal data.