Are our cellphones a growing security risk?

I'm growing more and more concerned about the use of cellphones to do a huge number of different tasks. These expose us to more and more loss of privacy and/or criminal exploitation of their vulnerabilities.

For example, it was recently announced that the TSA is looking into using cellphones to track delays in movement through airport security checkpoints. It sounds innocent enough, a way to inform people about likely delays in real time, and so on - but it's also a means to track people who've committed no offense. What happens if that technology is taken out of the airport and installed in a city, to track everyone moving through it? What about our expectation of privacy? There are those who affirm that we have no expectation of privacy in a public place, but I don't agree. There's reasonable and appropriate monitoring of spaces from a public safety perspective, and then there's Big Brother. I don't want the latter.

Then there's the growing use of cellphones as a replacement for credit and/or debit cards. In Japan it's already commonplace to use one's cellphone to pay for purchases at shops, from vending machines, and so on. The phone transmits a signal that is picked up and processed by the point-of-sale machinery. That's all well and good . . . but what's the fraud rate like? I imagine it'd be relatively easy to set up a receiver to intercept such communications, decode them, and re-transmit them to buy items using another person's credit information. How often is this already happening? No-one's saying, but I'm sure it's already a reality.

There's also the immense number of different applications running on 'smart phones'. I've been looking into them this week, considering an upgrade to my cellular service. A single 'smart phone' can replace a GPS navigation device; an MP3 music player; a camera; a credit card (see above); a portable computer (it can handle e-mail and Web browsing with no problem); and so on. All those things are most convenient . . . but if we lose our cellphone? We're left without any access to all those areas, and the loss might be crippling to many. Even worse, if we haven't encrypted our personal information on the phone, and someone steals it, they can get access to our bank accounts, e-mails, address list, photographs stored on the phone (which can prove very embarrassing indeed), and so on. All those things in one device look more and more like a very expensive loss just waiting to happen.

What say you, readers? Are cellphones becoming so multi-faceted as to be an indispensable tool, but carrying with them all the dangers of a one-stop-shop do-everything device?

Peter