Many if not most people own smartphones today and they hold a lot of information. What happens should you lose it?
The security risk of lost smartphones
The number of people who attempt to access private data when faced with a lost smartphone is unnerving. Researchers at Symantec came up with the “Smartphone Honey Stick Project” to examine this, and found that around 96 percent of people tried to access personal information and 45 percent of people tried to access the corporate e-mails on lost smartphones. The most unnerving part about this is that smartphones can be extremely easy to lose.
Human nature and smartphone tech
The Symantec study was in essence studying human nature. 50 smartphones were left in large cities in North America; namely New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Ottawa. The various files the phones contained were fake and had enticing labels such as “online banking” and “saved passwords”.
Ultimately, the final results were that 72 percent of people that found the “lost” phone accessed the photos. So, people are curious. That’s no crime. But 43 percent of individuals tried to access the “online banking” files. That is a much more telling.
Protecting your smartphone
These numbers may be frightening but there are things that people can do to defend themselves should they misplace their smartphones.
First, users ought to protect their devices with passwords. Secondly, they should install security programs designed especially for their smartphones. These programs can lock up apps and files on smartphones. Others can help find missing phones while still others can wipe a smartphones’ memory from remote locations.