Lost Smartphones Can Cause Anxiety Disorders: Study

Losing one's smartphone causes anxiety disorder in people as it not only represents an immediate disconnection from one's online contacts but also a potential privacy and security risk, a new study suggests.

The smartphone has changed our behaviour, sometimes for the better as we are now able to connect and engage with many more people than ever before, sometimes for the worse in that we may have become over-reliant on the connectivity with the outside world that these devices afford us, researchers said. Either way, there is no going back for the majority of users who can almost instantaneously connect with hundreds if not thousands of people through the various social media and other applications available on such devices and not least through the humble phone call.

However, our dependence brings anxiety. The loss of one's smartphone not only represents an immediate disconnection from one's online contacts but is also a potential privacy and security risk should the lost phone wend its way into the hands of a malicious third party, said researchers. The researchers point out that the same anxieties apply equally to lost or stolen laptops, tablet computers and other digital devices.

Zhiling Tu, Yufei Yuan and Norm Archer of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, explain that the convenience of mobility, wireless communication and the information processing power of smartphones and other portable digital devices has led to more and more people carrying with them valuable data assets wherever they go. These assets may include personal and business contacts, private pictures and videos, meeting and lecture notes and the like, banking details, utility statements, company spreadsheets and much more. All such assets are potentially sensitive to abuse by third parties.

The researchers add that as many companies now have a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policy rather than dispensing a standard corporate device to all employees there are additional security issues that arise from their being centralised control of the data on a given device. The value of lost hardware might be negligible when compared to the loss of sensitive or proprietary data. Perhaps more troubling is that while there are various counter-measures that can be used to cope with mobile device loss and theft, users are either unaware of their existence or unwilling to use them, the researchers said.

The cost and convenience of security counter-measures also need to be weighed up. The team has investigated how general mobile phone users might not cope with the threat of losing their device.

They found that a few active and security-conscious users were aware of counter-measures but many users were either not aware of "time bomb" data deletion settings and remote device locks and such or were simply in denial of the risk of their losing their phone. The research was published in the International Journal of Mobile Communications.