This decade can easily be described as the “Mobile Decade.” Nowadays information is at the tips of your fingers no matter where you are in the world as long as you have a mobile device that can send and receive information. In this day and age you would be lucky to come across a high school or college student that did not possess a cell phone or any other mobile device. Also, now with the inventions of social networks, information is constantly being sent and received by different people all over the world. The problem with this is the type of information that is being transmitted all over as well as how it is being transmitted. There have been a lot of concerns about how private information is easily accessible through mobile devices. Since there was a lot of speculation about this topic, we did a survey to find out how people are using their cell phones.
The first question we asked was, “how often is your cell phone with you?” Out of 79 people that took the survey, about 63% said that they always have their cell phone with them. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, but in terms of mobile security this is a really good thing. If your phone is always with you there is less of a chance that somebody could steal your phone and get into things like your email or your bank account if you use mobile banking. It’s always good to have your cell phone with you or to know where it is.
The second question posed was, “does your cell phone require a password or passcode to be entered in order to access it?” Surprisingly about 75% of the people that we polled said that they do not have a password or passcode on their phone. With me, I have a Motorola Droid and I require a passcode to access my phone, especially because my phone is directly linked to my email and my Facebook page and anyone could just access them without any problems. I think it is important for people to have passwords or passcodes so that only they can access the information they have in their phone.
Our third question was not created to illicit any numeric data relating to who has what capabilities on their phone, etc. Instead, it was meant to better understand how secure people felt when using Internet capabilities on their phones. We asked how worried users were about cell phone viruses. A staggering 96.3% of the 79 people who took the online survey said that they were not worried or hardly worried (one bubble up from "not worried.") This led to our main digging for information to see how worried people should be.
The following question was somewhat related to the aforementioned one, but asked if people had any anti-virus programs installed on their phones. Only 10.1% of 79 said yes, while the rest claimed to not know if they had it or not, or did not have any altogether for sure. Surely people should be more concerned with the state of their cell phones' vulnerability from a cyber perspective? We delved even deeper with the next question, trying to get to the bottom of this and see if our fears were unfounded (or relevant).
The fifth and sixth questions on our survey asked detailed questions regarding internet use on cell phones. Quickly jumping to the eighth, as a reference point, only 34 people in our online study of 79 had any Internet capabilities on their phones (smartphone or otherwise). Out of these 34, the distribution for how frequently people check their email was pretty spread out. The more you check your email, the more likely you would be to open something containing a malignant code, so that was the purpose of posing such a question. The next asked, more specifically, if anyone had actually been hacked through their cell phone's Internet. Only one person of our 79 online participants had ever been hacked through the Internet on their phone. This alone suggests how little people should be worried, if the chances are 1/79 in our survey (and possibly more if a larger sample was taken).
Bluetooth devices can also create greater vulnerability patches for cell phone users, as their conversations can be intercepted and listened to through radio frequencies. Website Gizmoto gives specific, detailed instructions on how to eavesdrop on someone's conversation when they are using a Bluetooth headset. Looking at the Google results I got, it seems like a fairly simple task. What does this mean? Do not give out sensitive information on your bluetooth. Physically, this would make sense anyways, as you would not like a passerby overhearing your bank account PIN when you do mobile banking.
Another question we asked our population was if they owned a smartphone or phone with internet capabilities. According to the survey, the results were pretty even, although there were 9 more people who did not have a smartphone. I also found that to be a little surprising because I figured people nowadays want as many features as they can get on their phone. According to an article on lmk.girlscouts.org, only 28% of teens have web-capability on their phones and they only use it for email, checking the weather, sports scores, and social networking. This is really surprising because almost everyone I know has a cell phone that has web-capabilities. I guess this could be a good thing because that means you’re not using email or social networking or banking and you have almost no chance of being vulnerable to cell phone hackers.
The last 2 questions really tie into each other about sharing information with their cell phone. We asked, “how easily do you give out your cell phone number online,” and “how often do you give out personally identifiable information on your cell phone via text, calling, email, etc?” According to the survey, 60% of the population we polled gave their number out to a few websites online. I am part of that 60% because for instance, I use Facebook Mobile, Mobile Email, AOL Instant Messenger, and Skype on my phone, all of which require me to put my cell phone number on their websites. Forty-five percent rarely give out personally identifiable information via cell phone. I think that you have to be careful about what information you give to people and how you give it out.
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