Understanding children’s mobile device usage

Smartphones and tablets have become important in daily life as they provide a convenient and mobile means to seek, access and share information. This convenience carries a downside in the rising concern with mobile security. Conveying the importance of personal digital security is notoriously difficult with adult users and perhaps more so for users who are children. Children are avid consumers of novel apps, frequently install new programs, and regularly update existing ones. Since apps can have hidden actions or malicious behaviour, this places users at risk from malicious or modified apps and some teenage users avoid specific apps out of concern for privacy. For example, location information is considered sensitive, so thousands of mobile apps that access GPS data, might impact upon children’s privacy and security. This paper reports a school-based survey of mobile usage as a perspective on issues in smartphone security. Our results suggest that males are more cautious than females in relation to installation of software applications on mobile devices and tend to be more aware of permission issues than their female counterparts. In contrast, a larger proportion of females than males received upsetting, attacking or bullying content from other people.