VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese smartphone users do not care much about protecting data and accounts on their smartphones, according to a survey carried out by the Bkav Internet Security Corporation.

Vietnamese users should care more about protecting data and accounts on their smartphones.

Users purchase, sell, lend or borrow smartphones but still keep their accounts saved on their phones.

This opens up a risk of losing important information such as photos, messages, emails, contacts and so on.

Popular applications for smartphones sync data between devices. For example, chat contents on Facebook are updated at the same time on all the devices in which users log in the account.

If someone borrows another person's smartphone while their Facebook account is logged in, the person borrowing the phone can read everything the owner chats with friends on the computer.

With applications allowing users to save photos online, such as Dropbox and Photostream, photos will be automatically uploaded to servers, and then be downloaded to all devices having the same accounts.

Nguyen Minh Duc, vice president of Bkav internet security division, said: "Awareness of users cannot catch up with the rapid development of technology. Smartphones should be considered as computers, not as mobile phones and they need to be protected."

Bkav experts recommended that when lending or selling smartphones, users must remove installed accounts or reset the phones. In return, when receiving any used smart-phones, users have to remove any previous accounts to prevent these accounts from posting their personal information.

Source: VNS