A socio-technical investigation into smartphone security

Abstract

Many people do not deliberately act to protect the data on their Smartphones. The most obvious explanation for a failure to behave securely is that the appropriate mechanisms are unusable. Does this mean usable mechanisms will automatically be adopted? Probably not! Poor usability certainly plays a role, but other factors also contribute to nonadoption of precautionary mechanisms and behaviours. We carried out a series of interviews to determine justifications for non-adoption of security precautions, specifically in the smartphone context, and developed a model of Smartphone precaution non-adoption. We propose that future work should investigate the use of media campaigns in raising awareness of these issues.