impact of mobile phones on personal privacy
The Impact of Mobile Phones on Personal Privacy Today a mobile phone to some people is as common as putting their clothes on in the morning. There are approximately 800 million mobile phones users worldwide of whom around 9% use the analogue system and the remaining 91% use the digital system. ... Other reasons why the digital system is in greater use is the Internet and the mobile e-commerce. ... The digital system allows the power of the Internet to be brought to the mobility of our mobile phone. Yet what do these conveniences of a mobile phone mean in terms of protection of our personal privacy? Firstly, why would anyone want to invade someones privacy? ... There are many different ways in which a person’s mobile phone security is vulnerable to attack. Intruders can manipulate or delete messages, stop a authorised user from using the service by jamming their signal or overloading the service, gain access to the service by posing to be a legitimate user, browse data storage for personal information, work out a user’s location, listen in on conversations, and finally, cause harm to the network. Due to the fact that mobile phones use air as their medium for the transmitting of their signals, there is a possibility that the signal can be intercepted relatively easily, with the right equipment, for hackers to commit the above illicit acts. ... All that is required is a mobile phone electronic serial number reader or a police scanner. ... After this, the charges of any calls made or services used from both phones, are billed to the original account. ... Mobile phones connected to the digital system have come under threat of a different type of cloning, SIM cloning. The phones contain a “subscriber identity module” card, known as a SIM card, which holds personal information about the account holder and is used to identify him/her and is inserted in the back of the phone.