The Guardian view on internet security: a huge and growing problem | Editorial

The power of smartphones is too easily turned against their users. Governments, companies and users must all work together to keep themselves safe

The phone in your pocket gives you powers that were hard to imagine even five years ago. It can talk to you, listen, and give sensible answers to questions. It knows your fingerprint and recognises your face and those of all your friends. It can buy almost anything, sell almost anything, bring you all the news you want, as well as almost all the books, films and music you might want to look at. What's more, it will even allow you to talk to your friends and to communicate with almost anyone.

The problem is that these powers are not yours - at least they don't belong to you alone. They belong to whoever controls the phone and can be used to serve their purposes as well as yours. Repressive governments and criminal gangs are all contending to break into phones today, and this kind of hacking will increasingly become the preferred route into all of the computer networks that we use - the ones we don't call "phones".

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