As part of its ongoing study of people and electronics, Retrevo has issued results of another user survey – this one on ‘Mobile Protection & Data’. It’s all about security awareness levels among ‘cellphone’ users – but since the three platforms covered are iOS, Android and Blackberry I’m just going to say smartphone users.
The headline conclusion of the survey:
Android Owners Are Most Unprepared
And some quick highlights of the study:
- 39% of Android owners haven’t done anything to prevent someone from misusing data on their cell phone if it were lost or stolen (compared to 30% of BlackBerry owners and 26% of iPhone owners.
- Only 32% of Android owners think their cell phones CAN get malware and 27% don’t know.
- 36% of iPhone owners think their cell phone CAN get malware and 30% don’t know.
- If they lost their cell phone today, only 18% of Android owners would use a recovery service to get their cell phone back, compared to 28% of BlackBerry owners and 37% of iPhone owners. 39% of Android owners don’t know how they would get their cell phones back, compared with 31% of BlackBerry owners and 26% of iPhone owners.
- BlackBerry (62%) and iPhone (61%) owners are the most likely to have password protection on their cell phone, compared to Android owners (only 49%).
Apple iPhone and BlackBerry owners come across as a safer set of phone owners and the responses to this question reinforce that with almost two thirds indicating they password protect their phones compared to half the Android owners. BlackBerry owners are up there with the iPhone owners when it comes to protecting their phones from prying eyes while more Android owners say they don’t do anything to safeguard their phones.
You can check out the full survey results here: http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2011/08/iphones-backups-and-toilets-connection
OK, I’m an iOS user all the way – maybe I’m expected to chuckle and say ‘Ha – look at how ignorant those Android users are’, but I have to say my first reaction when I see these survey results is that they sound way, way off.
Not to pigeonhole people too much here, but my experience has been that most Android users are very tech-savvy. As much, or often more so than iPhone and iOS users. They’ve never struck me as being clueless about mobile data protection or security. I would argue that Android is inherently a less secure platform because of its openness, but I’d never argue that its users are unaware and unconcerned about security on their devices.
Well there you go – there’s my quota of defending Android users met for this week / month / lifetime. What do you all think? Are Android users really the least savvy when it comes to smartphones and security?
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