Law

• In July 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office announced that jailbreaking your iPhone is legal. According to CNN, as of July 2010, around nine percent of iPhone users have gone ahead and jailbroken their iPhones.
  
  

Risks

• Jailbreaking can leave your iPhone susceptible to having data stolen and invasion by malware. It can also render your warranty with Apple useless. Once a phone has been jailbroken, it can be accessed via laptops enabling someone to log in to your phone.
  
  

Protection

• One way to protect yourself, if you jailbreak your phone, is by changing the default passwords of the iPhone. However, this is a difficult procedure and not for beginners. The Internet has a variety of blogs and websites that offer instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone and how to change the default passwords.