Norton releases mobile survey

Nearly one in two Indians have granted access to contacts and mobile data in exchange for free apps, 50% have granted permission to send promotional texts/emails, and close to 40% have granted permission to access their camera, bookmarks and browser history, reveals Norton Mobile Survey, which was released on Tuesday.

The survey was commissioned by Norton by Symantec, and conducted across 14 cities, with 1,005 Indian smartphone and tablet users aged 16 and above.

“As many as 10.8 million apps were analysed in 2015, of which 3.3 million were classified as malware, which is a 230% increase compared with 2014,” said Ritesh Chopra, country manager, India, Norton by Symantec, adding that users download apps from 200 app stores.

Two out of three Indians, that is 65% now access the internet more often on a mobile device than on a PC and check their devices 41 times a day, on an average.

“We also found that close to 50% of Indians have over 20 apps on their smartphones, and top 5 commonly used apps were social networking (86%),  messaging/chat (78%), ecommerce (76%), followed by mobile banking (67%) and mobile wallet (62%),” said Chopra, adding barely 8% reject requests for risk.

The survey shows that the most concerning security issues for mobile users were virus/malware attacks (34%), followed by threats involving fraudulent access or misuse of credit card or bank account details (21%) and hacking or leaking of personal information (19%).

“Mobiles are like mini computers in your pocket, and people store everything- from photographs to videos and conversations- thus unknowingly put personal information that resides on mobile phones at risk and compromise one’s privacy. We need to educate people on mobile security,” he said, adding use strong passwords, be vigilant and review settings and update regularly.