Chances are you lock your door when you leave home, don’t leave the keys in the ignition when you run into the 7-Eleven for milk and have at least some kind of security software on your computer.
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But what about your smart phone?
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For many people, a phone these days is a mobile office crammed with valuable contacts, a digital wallet from which you buy songs on iTunes or shoes on Amazon, and a portal to your online bank account.
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Rather than locking the phones like bank vaults, most smart phone owners treat their devices with as much concern as they do Monopoly money.
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According to a survey by data security provider Symantec, 54 percent of smart phone users do not have a password lock on their phones when they turn them on or wake them from sleep mode.
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I think there’s definitely an awareness gap right now, said Mark Kanok, group product manager for the Norton mobile division at Symantec.
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Just a few years ago, your phone was a phone. Then the iPhone comes out and people are downloading apps. People are now starting to ask the questions about, ‘How is this going to affect my privacy, what happens if I lose it,’ things like that.
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On top of the dangers of your phone being lost or stolen, there are also a growing number of malicious apps designed to steal data from it or rack up huge texting bills.
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Last week, Google pulled several dozen free apps from its Android market that had been stuffed with damaging code.
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Symantec estimated that the apps were downloaded anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 times in a four-day period before they were pulled.
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John Thode, vice president and general manager of the mobility product group for Dell Inc., said many smart phone users don’t realize the value of their device until it’s gone.
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The…