More than half of Danes admit to peeking at strangers’ phone screens, and a new survey reveals the country leads the Nordics when it comes to screen curiosity — a behaviour known as shoulder surfing.
According to the survey, 58% of Danes say they have accidentally glanced at a stranger’s phone screen, while 30% admit to doing so out of pure curiosity. That puts Denmark ahead of Norway (25%), Sweden (21%) and Finland (20%) as the most screen-curious nation in the region. Public transport is the primary hotspot, named by 53% of respondents as the place where it happens most often.
From dating apps to bank details, nothing is off-limits
The content people are catching glimpses of goes well beyond the harmless. More than a third of Danes (35%) say they have seen personal content on a stranger’s screen in public, and 31% admit to having seen things they probably shouldn’t have. The most commonly spotted content includes:
- Personal photos — 34%
- Images from a partner — 31%
- Video calls — 28%
- Social media activity — 27%
- Online shopping — 23%
- Dating app notifications or profiles — 15%
- Banking information such as account balances — 12%
Over half of Danes (55%) have also sensed that someone else was watching their own screen. Reactions to this vary: 43% simply stop using their phone, 27% ignore it, another 27% look away immediately — while 16% confess they keep on looking discreetly. Only 14% directly confront the person watching.
While hacking and data breaches are often associated with sophisticated cyber attacks, shoulder surfing is a low-tech but very real privacy threat playing out in everyday public spaces — on trains, in queues (32%), and even at cafés (12%).
Awareness of this vulnerability appears to be growing. In 2022, 73% of Danes said they felt fully or reasonably secure against mobile threats. By 2024, that figure had dropped to just 53%.
“I wish more people understood that security and privacy protection is also about getting better at protecting our data on our mobile screens — not just when it comes to professional hacking.”
— Søren Rinnov Østergaard, Country Manager, Samsung Denmark
Despite this concern, behaviour doesn’t always follow. A 2025 survey found that only 38% of Danes actively consider security features when purchasing consumer electronics — even though nearly nine in ten (87%) say they are concerned to some degree about whether their personal data is private and secure on their devices.
The survey was conducted to mark the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra (our deep review here), which introduces Privacy Display — a built-in screen filter designed to block the view of anyone looking from the side, keeping on-screen content visible only to the person looking directly at the display, without compromising screen quality. The feature is backed by seven years of security updates and requires manual activation in the device settings.
The survey was conducted by Censuswide among 11,000 smartphone users across 11 European markets, including 1,000 respondents in Denmark.
