Dyman Associates Risk Management
Assigning risk scores to apps may slow down unwarranted access to personal information
October 28, 2014
What information is beaming from your mobile phone over various computer networks this very second without you being aware of it?
Experts say your contact lists, email messages, surfed webpages, browsing histories, usage patterns, online purchase records and even password protected accounts may all be sharing data with intrusive and sometimes malicious applications, and you may have given permission.
"Smartphones and tablets used by today's consumers include many kinds of sensitive information," says Ninghui Li, a professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in Indiana.
Li, along with Robert Proctor and Luo Si, also professors at Purdue, lead a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project "User-Centric Risk Communication and Control on Mobile Devices," that investigates computer security. The work pays special attention to user control of security features in mobile systems.
Most users pay little attention
"Although strong security measures are in place for most mobile systems," they write in a recent report inthe journal IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, "the area where these systems often fail is the reliance on the user to make decisions that impact the security of a device."