How often do you use your smartphone?
If you’re like
nearly 80%
of smartphone users, you have your phone with you nearly 24/7. Many of
us can’t sleep without them by our sides, and they’re the first thing we
check when we get up in the morning. Almost a third of us
can’t imagine living without it.
Hard to believe that such a ubiquitous device hasn’t been around all that long. While
the telephone
has been around in one form or another for well over a century, and
cell phones for a few decades now, the smartphone is still very new. The
first modern touchscreen smartphones were the iPhone, launched in 2007, followed by the launch of Android OS in 2008.
But in just a few short years, the total number of
people using smartphones worldwide has already surpassed a
billion.
Smartphone usage around the world is rapidly approaching 50% of the
entire world’s population. We use our smartphones constantly for daily
activities like chatting with friends, banking and shopping, and even
monitoring our health. There’s an app for everything you can think of,
from
drunk dialing prevention, to detecting
paranormal activity, and more.
Since our phones are always by our sides, they reveal a lot of information about us.
And even though they haven’t been around that long, there are already
those who’ve learned to take advantage of all that information.
You’ve probably heard that the NSA has been
spying on smartphones, reading our texts and emails and even tracking our movements.
But they’re not the only ones. With the wealth of easily accessible
information about you that your smartphone can provide, many businesses,
organizations, and others have learned to use that data to their own
ends.
Here’s who’s doing the spying, and what steps you can take to keep your personal data private.
LINK
(CNN)
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