• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: THE ANATOMY OF SMARTPHONE UNLOCKING : Why and How Android Users Around the World Lock their Phones : Why and How Android Users Around the World Lock their Phones
  • Contributor: Malkin, Nathan; Harbach, Marian; De Luca, Alexander; Egelman, Serge
  • imprint: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2017
  • Published in: GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1145/3036699.3036712
  • ISSN: 2375-0529; 2375-0537
  • Keywords: General Earth and Planetary Sciences ; General Environmental Science
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: <jats:p>To prevent unauthorized access to their smartphones, users can enable a "lock screen," which may require entering a PIN or password, drawing a pattern, or providing a biometric. We present the results of two studies that together offer a detailed analysis of the smartphone locking mechanisms currently available to billions of smartphone users worldwide. An online survey (N=8,286), conducted in eight different countries, sheds light on people's reasons for choosing their screen lock method and demonstrates significant crosscultural differences in attitudes towards this subject. In a separate monthlong field study (N=134), we studied how existing lock screen mechanisms provide users with distinct tradeoffs between usability and security, identifying areas where both could be improved.</jats:p>