Shielding your phone screen from prying eyes as you scroll through your photo library…snatching away your handset to guard your private videos from a public airing…reaching desperately for the mute button as the strains of an embarrassing tune accidentally leak out from your mobile.
Recognise any of these behaviours in yourself? Sure you do. Well there’s a name for people like you. Mobile hoarders – or ‘moarders’ to be specific.
Portable, discrete and full of secrets, our smartphones today are a potential hub of embarrassing information for us all, and a new Three survey shows that Britain is a nation of ‘moarders’ – with one in five of us keen to hide content on our mobile phones.
In the research, conducted by Vision Critical, using a sample of 2,000 UK adults, it was found that for Southern ‘moarders’, self-portraits top the embarrassment list, with one in five people (19%) confessing to keeping uncomfortable pictures of themselves pouting and posing on their smartphones.
Surprisingly, the research also discovered that men are rather sentimental, with twice the amount of men than women (2:1) admitting to storing pictures of their ex-partners on their phone.
Worryingly, one in 10 of those under 35 admit to keeping details of who they have been stalking on Facebook. Meanwhile, 12 per cent of 18-34 year olds reveal their taste in music is not always on trend and confess they’d suffer ‘shuffle shame’ if anyone stumbled across their music collection.
And with smartphone ownership expected to account for 80% of all phones by the end of 2012, Discover is certain that the population of ‘Moarders’ will only continue to grow.
A PICTURE OF EMBARRASSMENT
The Top five smartphone embarrassments:
- Uncomfortable pictures of yourself posing and pouting
- 'Shuffle shame’ music
- Sentimental pictures of ex-partners
- Details of people you’ve been stalking on social networks
- Bookmarks/links to articles on embarrassing health problems
