More and more people are surfing the Web with their smartphones than ever before, meaning more people should be aware of just what their smartphones are doing. 

A new report by the Pew (News - Alert) research and polling service suggests more people now feel as though their mobile device has been accessed by an outside person in a way that violates a user’s privacy.

Smartphones are more popular than they ever were before, and for good reason. There doesn’t seem to be much that you can’t do with them these days, and it doesn’t appear to matter from whom you get yours.

Whether Web surfing is the main goal of your smartphone usage, or it’s more about listening to music or watching movies, smartphone user numbers just keep on growing. 

The Pew study found that more smartphone owners than regular cellular phone users (15 percent compared to 8 percent) feel as though their privacy has been violated on their phones. That seems to only make sense, as regular cell phones are simply not anywhere near as attractive a target than non-smartphones, whose market is dwindling. 


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The report also says 43 percent of those who participated have downloaded apps on their smartphones. That number is up a whopping 12 percent from last year, so more people than ever need to worry about the kind of information being broadcast through those applications. 

The report also showed that a majority (54 percent) of smartphone users say they actually decided against downloading one kind of app or another because of the personal information to which that application wanted access. 

Another 30 percent said they have actually uninstalled an application because of privacy concerns.

While most people would think that companies would change the kind of information they gather, thanks to privacy concerns, it seems that those companies are instead simply hiding that they share information at all.

Facebook (News - Alert), for one, attempts to distract with colors and design to get people to add applications that would be granting anonymous developers access to a lot of personal information.

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