Feeling secure vs. being secure the mobile phone user case

Abstract

In this work, we are comparing the subjective security feeling of mobile phone users to the (objectively agreed) best security practices. This was possible by statistically processing a large pool of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 European countries. We introduced a "mean actual security value", comparing their security practices to best practices. There was a clear negative connection between feeling secure and actually being secure. Users that feel that mobile phone communication is secure, tend to be less cautious in their security practices. Moreover, we extracted profiles of students according to their mobile phone communication security feeling. These profiles belong to well defined categories. Users, exhibit different values of a metric that we named "mean security feeling value" according to their age, field of study, brand and operating system of phone, connection type, monthly bill and backup frequency. These results can help both academia and industry focus their security awareness campaigns and efforts to specific subsets of users that mostly need them. Finally, as there are not available any already validated questionnaires in regards to this specific research topic, our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.