A Survey on Saving Personal Data in the Mobile Phone

Abstract

Modern smart phones have provided users countless opportunities to access, process and store data in various ways and formats. Inevitably, the user himself has started storing personal data too in the mobile phone. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the practice of saving personal data in mobile phones. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. 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.