A survey reveals people’s habits and behaviour towards internet safety. By Team Viva
Today, we cannot imagine our lives without the internet. It’s not an era of gaining knowledge through spending hours in libraries and with books. It’s a Google Search era. However, not many are aware of the impact it has on people and about creating a safer and better internet.
On the Safer Internet Day, OLX an online marketplace company released a survey about 2019 internet behaviour and impact. The survey with 26,000+ netizens revealed internet behaviour and attitude towards safety — both online and in general — with an aim to drive awareness and call for action to all users and play an active role towards creating a better and safer internet for all, especially the younger lot. The survey covers respondents between 18 to 55 years of age from Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad.
As per the survey, a majority of netizens neglected cybersecurity practices in their personal lives. Around 57 per cent respondents showed negligence towards their safety — both online and offline. Around 56 per cent of netizens freely shared their personal details like mobile number on their professional or official social media accounts. Over 14,543 users made their contact numbers visible online on accounts like LinkedIn, whereas only 11,648 users didn’t share it.
There were some personal revelations too. While 6,355 netizens said that they regularly monitor their children and what they do online, 9,600 of them never did it, whereas, around 10, 236 netizens said that they don’t have children. The total graph showed that 60 per cent of the parents in the surveyed group didn’t monitor the content their kids consume online.
Moving on to personal awareness, around 67 per cent said they skipped reading the ‘terms & conditions’ or any other safety/legal guidelines while signing up to a website or using a product. There only 8,689 users who read the terms and conditions against 17,502 users who didn’t.
The survey also revealed some regular habits like changing of passwords. While 54 per cent of the people said they had not changed the passwords to their social media accounts in the last six months to a year, 31 per cent admitted they cannot even recall how long had it been since they last changed their passwords.
A similar neglect towards safety measures was also observed with police verification of household staff. Around 75 per cent confirmed that they had not conducted a police verification or did not know if one had to be done. About only 25 per cent confirmed having observed this process for household staff. Respondents from Delhi were the highest among those who said they observe this process for household staff, followed by those from Mumbai.
However, contradictory to the overall neglect, there also existed a high degree of awareness with financial safety. Around 68 per cent said that they had never shared their OTP or password for their bank account, social media accounts, laptop or phone with anyone.
Lavanya Chandan, general counsel of the said company, said, “The internet dominates our lives like nothing else. It is in our interest, therefore, to use it in a manner that continues to improve the quality of our lives while staying safe by implementing the same level of caution we exercise in the real world.”