Evaluating User Behavior in Smartphone Security: A Psychometric Perspective

Smartphones have become an essential part of our modern society. Their popularity and ever-increasing relevance in our daily lives make these devices an integral part of our computing ecosystem. Yet, we know little about smartphone users and their security behaviors. In this paper, we report our development and testing of a new 14-item Smartphone Security Behavioral Scale (SSBS) which provides a measurement of users’ smartphone security behavior considering both technical and social strategies. For example, a technical strategy would be resetting the advertising ID while a social strategy would be downloading mobile applications only from an official source.The initial analysis of two-component behavioral model, based on technical versus social protection strategies, demonstrates high reliability and good fit for the social component of the behavioral scale. The technical component of the scale, which has theoretical significance, shows a marginal fit and could benefit from further improvement. This newly developed measure of smartphone security behavior is inspired by the theory of planned behavior and draws inspiration from a well-known scale of cybersecurity behavioral intention, the Security Behavior Intention Scale (SeBIS). The psychometrics of SSBS were established by surveying 1011 participants. We believe SSBS measures can enhance the understanding of human security behavior for both security researchers and HCI designers.