The recent spate of articles on the topic of smartphone addiction reflects growing concerns about our reduced cognitive capacity, increasing loneliness and depression, and our diminishing ability to control where our attention is focused—all attributed to the increasing amount of smartphone screen time in our daily lives.
Our daily smartphone use in the U.S. has grown to over 4 hours per day, according to eMarketer. And in the details we see that the vast majority of that time is due to our use of mobile apps. It's not the smartphone that's addictive, but the apps—which are specifically designed to keep us engaged, and by that they mean using their apps for longer so that the stalker economy can profit from our attention.
Make no mistake: Apps such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter employ an economic model that's tied to keeping your attention on their app (despite what their marketing departments say about connecting people). That's for two reasons: first, to serve us more ads; second, to surveil us for longer so that companies such as Acxiom, Epsilon, Datalogix, RapLeaf, Reed Elsevier, BlueKai, Spokeo, and Flurry can collect more data about us. These companies are players in the $156 billion per year data surveillance industry— an industry that exists so that marketing companies can serve us the best ads, depending on dozens of factors including where we are at any given time. Usage patterns, what other apps we use, and how we use them allow marketers to determine our gender, profession, marital status, sexual orientation, income level, age, health conditions, and other personal characteristics. Flurry, for example, identifies app users based on their persona such as Business Travelers, Pet Owners, and New Moms, among many others.
Enterprises in the U.S. don't worry all that much about protecting employees' privacy. But they are concerned about employee productivity, and ensuring that—unlike Homer Simpson in the cartoon above—their employees focus their attention on the job at hand. That's why Facebook is one of the most common apps for enterprises to blacklist. Other approaches to eliminate employee loss of attention include adoption of container strategies such as Android Enterprise and Samsung Knox so that employees can only use work-related apps while they're at work.
But employees resist corporate attempts to control what apps are on their devices, and containers' adoption is slowed by ease of use and other concerns. What other options exist for enterprise mobile security?
As we outlined in a prior post, any mobile security approach for enterprises that requires users to delete apps from their devices will be subject to resistance from app-addicted employees. That's one reason why Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solutions face deployment headwinds. And unless app policies are developed in a strong partnership with the HR department, and employees agree to such measures as a condition of employment, enterprises will find it very challenging to enforce any but the most egregious security concerns regarding employee-owned devices.
Instead, enterprises should investigate a lightweight approach to mobile security that's transparent to employees but which has the ability to prevent operation of enterprise-selected personal apps while the employee is at work. But every day when they leave the workplace, their apps are re-enabled and will work normally while the employee is on personal time and away from the office. That's the security model that has served enterprise laptops for the past decade, and it's a logical separation between work and personal use of mobile devices.
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Note: Many of the ideas explored in this post were stimulated by two books: Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World, by Marc Goodman, and The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, by Tim Wu. I am indebted to them both.
