It is very rightly said: “With great power comes great responsibility”, however, what they did not mention is that great responsibility leads to a greater tendency for accidents to happen. This holds true in all aspects of life, including the inclusion of a number of devices that have become essential to our everyday lives. With technology growing by the minute, a lot of us end up owning several devices like laptops, tablets, mobile phones (more than one at times) and even desktops but to keep track of all of them can be a bit of a task.
Since these devices are usually considered expensive, their theft is not uncommon. Even if they are not stolen, we tend to misplace them at times. This is where PREY comes into the picture. It is an anti-theft tracking application for all of the above mentioned devices. If a device is stolen or just goes missing, PREY remotely locates, locks, wipes and recovers it. Not just that, it can also trigger alarms or flash a message on the device to the let thief know that they have been located and something is being done about it.
It is different from other trackers as it allows one to keep a tab on all of their devices on a single platform and generates information that police departments need to do their job. All it requires from us is installation of the app. Even if the device is connected via Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi, PREY works.
Once the app is installed, it sleeps calmly without doing a thing till we send an activation signal. When we do, it only gathers the information we request for and sends it. In other words, our privacy is respected by this app and no information is gathered without our consent. Also, it does not create its own database with our data. It does nothing with our data, apart from keeping a weekly backup. When in doubt, we can always check our source code to make sure that nothing is happening without our approval.
However, PREY does not allow us to store innumerable reports (including screenshots, webcam pictures, geo locations, etc.) in our accounts. The number of reports that can be stored is different for the paid and the free account. In the free account, the maximum number of reports per device can go up to ten after which the app will start deleting the old reports automatically as new ones arrive. We can delete our old reports ourselves as well, according to the importance each report holds for us so that there is enough room for the most important ones.
It does not eat up any of the memory while it is sleeping. It uses memory-resident agents only when the program is actually being run so it does not hamper the performance of the device.
While PREY helps us out in a number of ways, it only asks for us to help it out in one way. The app urges us to password protect each device that has this app installed to prevent a thief from removing the app from the device in an unfortunate incident of theft.
Thus, just by installing PREY and password protecting our devices, we can always keep an eye on them.
