I live in a digitally connected family, but not necessarily a digitally conscious one. When I was growing up, my sister and I were introduced to America Online (AOL) when my parents brought home their first computer (an Acer that I miss to this day). We were digitally challenged not by how to connect and use the computer. Rather, we had no clue about the risks. My sister and I quickly set up AOL usernames and then became inundated with the internet, including hackers. People were contacting us and we didn’t know who they were. At one point, being twelve years old, I accidentally gave our home address to someone. My mother immediately realized that the internet had to adhere to the same rules as day to day life and reminded us of the saying, “Don’t talk to strangers.”
Eventually, I came to understand that there was a lot of fabricated content and people on the internet. I mused over the fact that my grandmother had sent me another chain mail. “You have to forward this one. It’s going to get to the president. It’s going to change his mind.” “No, it’s spam.” “No, it’s not.” My grandmother never did catch on. I spent most of my 20s and early 30s wiping out her computer after it was so weighed down by malware, she deemed it “unusable.”
When the Smart Phone arrived in the early 2000s, I was just out of college and had seen friends face identity theft just from making a bank transaction over their college wireless network. I was skeptical of the Smart Phone and for good reasons. The Smart Phone was just a mini, transportable computer, which meant that my family members that were digitally connected, but not digitally conscious, were now more at risk.
Needless to say, my aunt bought my grandmother a Smart Phone. The good news is she had no clue how to use it and would more often than not just accidentally dial us from her job at a hospital. We would listen as her pocket swished back and forth down the hall, her voice fading in and out. I would often hang up right away, concerned that I might actually hear sensitive information within the halls of the hospital. I would get accidental five minute voice mails and delete them. I would even get a call from her to ask, “Did you call me?”
Regardless of my grandmother’s lack of Smart Phone adoption, friends and family quickly adopted it around me. They used their Smart Phones to reload their Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts cards, they used it to check their bank accounts, and they used it to check in everywhere, including their bank. ApplePay came and my mother hopped right on. It was easy. She no longer had to carry around cards. I reminded her that having everything at her finger tips was a huge risk. It was as huge of a risk as carrying around a purse with your social security number, passport credit card, and checkbook in it all at the same time.
And at the same time, it was more of a risk. “Mom, what’s this app?” “Oh, it’s something your father found, so we downloaded it, because it’s neat.” “Yeah, but is it trustworthy?” “Well, it came from the store so it must be.”
My mother had not heard of mobile malware or the fact that many “fake” apps were popping up. Hackers were taking advantage of the app stores and sneaking apps in there that could connect all the data on your phone. For me, that isn’t a problem, because I use my phone for social media, e-mail, and general digital surfing. I do use it for my Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts apps as well, but I load those with cash as I go (never tying them to credit cards) and not enough money where it would be a loss to have it stolen. A phone is really just your identity in digital form. It tells people what you drink, what games you like to play, your financial business, and so on. It is everything in pocket size.
Of course, I did sell my parents on buying Apple products. I had switched to the brand years ago due to its “almost foolproof” security. Grant it, you can destroy an Apple in six months if you use games or other services with malware attached (I have a family member that proved that, accidentally), but it had been unpopular in the past so hackers focused more on Windows. That’s not the case now, but as seen by “Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2014: Overall statistics for 2014,” Apple continues to stay under the radar from a mobile threat perspective.
I imagine that will change drastically with ApplePay and you can never put all your eggs in one basket. I test out different brands all the time. I currently own an Acer Google Chromebook despite the statistics above, because it’s not so much the brand that you need to worry about. It’s the person who owns it. How digitally conscious are you? I’ll admit that when I finally joined the Smart Phone generation three years ago, I was probably over conscious. My Smart Phone didn’t get much of a chance to compute with the world because I limited it, well, to a phone. I’ve since taken educated risks and that’s the key – “educated” risks.
Research is everything. We do research in many of our life decisions, whether buying a house or car, buying an exercise bike on Amazon, or reading the comments on an online recipe to see if that recipe is actually recommended by reviewers that tried it (ever had cookies not rise and find out the recipe creator forgot one ingredient when they were writing it up – baking soda… I have). So why would downloading apps to your Smart Phone be any different? Why would what Smart Phone you pick out be any different? And why would how you use that Smart Phone to access your personal information be any different? It’s okay not to know the answer to something. It’s not okay to be inattentive to the risks.
Check out Stop. Think. Connect.’s “Safety Tips for Mobile Devices” for more details. Have young children? Print out the iZ HERO Mobile Safety Tips Poster from Stop. Think. Connect. and share it with your kids. Also, feel free to e-mail us with mobile tips or even mobile stories that you’d like to share with the University community. Or tweet it and tag us at @umass_sharedsvc with #digitallyconscious.
iZ Hero Mobile Saftey Tips Poster
