Mobile Phone Downloading among Students: The Status and Its Effect on Security

Mobile Internet is steadily gaining momentum allowing users to browse the World Wide Web from their mobile phones, downloading at the same time applications and games. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the state of mobile downloading penetration in the student population. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. Namely, users actively downloading are only 37% of the student population and are mostly concentrated in older student ages. In addition, their actual behavior in regards to security practices is generally better than that of other users, especially for those that mainly download applications. As it was found, students with lower monthly bills do not know if their mobile phone has the ability to download software. Thus, by enhancing their knowledge, operators will profit by increased mobile downloading while users will enjoy better services.