Are You Guilty of Poor Mobile Security?

View guide: How to Protect Data in Mobile Devices

Ask yourself that question. You might not know it yet, but you may be guilty of doing things that jeopardize your own security every time you're on your tablet or smartphone. If you're not mindful of your own mobile activities, they could bite you in the end.

One of the most common mistakes mobile users do is oversharing. Given how these gadgets make it easy for anyone to share content, users like yourself might be tempted to broadcast every little detail of your day online. To you, it might seem like harmless fun showing others what you wore or ate that day. But there might be those who are paying very close attention to your details.

Whatever content you post online can be used against you. Statements you make can be twisted and used for defamation. Details about your home can give crooks a better picture of how they can break in. Even a very trivial piece of information like your pet's name can be used to hack into your accounts, if you chose that as the answer to a security question.

Another overlooked activity is connecting to public hotspots. Though convenient, these wireless connections can be easily compromised. Do you have the necessary protection against these kinds of threats? Perhaps that thought never even crosses your mind when you’re connecting in public. The same applies when you’re downloading apps.

Some users indiscriminately download free apps from app stores. When a game like Flappy Birds, for example, gets popular, users often just search for it and then hit install without reading through the product page and the permissions they’re granting the app. This kind of user behavior often leads to malware infection. And that’s something you really want to avoid.

How about passwords? It’s one of the simplest ways to protect your mobile device and data. Do you use strong passwords for your mobile accounts? And if you do, do you make sure that your passwords are unique for each of your accounts? Basic password management can be tricky. Just imagine how trickier it is when you hook up your mobile device to the cloud. That opens up a completely different security concern altogether.