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The secure mobile teen: Looking at the secret world of children

Security and privacy of mobile users is a theme of primary importance, given the widespread and growing use of connected smartphones, the great amount of personal data that can leak, and the lack of proper controlled environments in the current mobile scenario (for instance, mobile apps and their handling of permissions). In this paper we focus on a crucial part of this scenario: usage of mobile phone by teenagers. We preliminarily report on an ongoing study that for the first time analyzes the true potential risks that children face when using their smartphones. The main novelty is to go beyond the use of questionnaires, which are a common and handy tool but that introduce bias in the analysis and are limited with respect to the amount of data they can collect. Instead we collect data using a parental control approach: with prior consent of the parents, the smartphones of underage children are controlled and analyzed in disguise, so that they are actually unaware of the monitoring. This allows to grasp the real, unfiltered behavior of kids, and to check on the potential risks for privacy and security during their mobile interactions. The obtained results, gathered from a wide pool of teens, shade new light on the potentially dangerous zones that underage children cross every day, and quantitatively give a footprint of unsafe activities. The viewpoint of the parents is also considered, checking on how their perception about sons and daughters mobile use is accurate, or if there is in fact a digital divide that needs to be filled, via awareness, education, dialogues and better privacy tools for the underage generations.