Keep on Lockin' in the Free World: A Multi-National Comparison of Smartphone Locking
Venue
Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'16), ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016) (to appear)
Publication Year
2016
Authors
Marian Harbach, Alexander De Luca, Nathan Malkin, Serge Egelman
BibTeX
Abstract
We present the results of an online survey of smartphone unlocking (N=8,286) that
we conducted in eight different countries. The goal was to investigate differences
in attitudes towards smartphone unlocking between different national cultures. Our
results show that there are indeed significant differences across a range of
categories. For instance, participants in Japan considered the data on their
smartphones to be much more sensitive than those in other countries, and
respondents in Germany were 4.5 times more likely than others to say that
protecting data on their smartphones was important. The results of this study shed
light on how motivations to use various security mechanisms are likely to differ
from country to country.
