Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

To give some context here, there were about 60,000 phone snatches in London in a year, just over a thousand a week. Which is roughly the same number of road traffic accidents in London, half of which cause some sort of injury, mostly very minor. And road traffic accidents are less prevalent in London than most other big cities. So the risk is there, but it's fairly low. If we say there are 10 million people in London in a given week, the chances of it happening to you are - whether a road accident or a phone snatch - is around 1 chance in 10,000. You have around a 1 in 50,000 chance of having a bad heart attack in the course of a week, or 1 chance in 20,000 of being hospitalised due to influenza (December 2024).

If you want to take a photo, just have a quick look around you, be aware, don't be glued to the screen, and you will be fine. It is your personal data they want, not so much the phone itself, so have a way to look down the phone and personal applications.