Utimaco, a global provider of IT security solutions, has released a whitepaper, ‘Circles of Trust: How the UK Public Perceives Digital Risk’ which uncovers how internet users in the United Kingdom and their counterparts in Germany and Spain, perceive safety in the digital ecosystem.
The report finds a central paradox at the heart of an increasingly online society: most people are enthusiastic about digital services but also concerned about their safety when using them. This presents a problem for digital service providers, whether they are in the public or private sector, and especially for governments like the United Kingdom’s, that aim to increase efficiency and inclusion through transitioning more services online.
One key finding is that 70 percent of surveyed respondents, representing internet users from across the United Kingdom, either worry a lot or a little about their security when using digital services. Only 10 percent don’t worry at all. This is despite only 15 percent of respondents answering that they had been harmed in some way by identity theft, data loss or fraud.
This distrust increases as respondents aged, and there were significant differences between the answers of respondents from different parts of the country. Twenty-two percent of respondents from London answered they ‘worry a lot’ about their security, compared to 11 percent in the East of England. There were also disparities between respondents with different educational backgrounds, with people with the most and least educational attainment perceiving the greatest risk.
Similar stories emerged when respondents were asked about digital health care and government services. Sixty-three percent of respondents said that given the choice they would use digital services to access health care when possible, and 46 percent consider the information they send to their health care provider to be secure, a higher level of confidence than most people had in digital security in general. This is likely to be explainable by the high level of public trust in the NHS as an institution rather than specific knowledge of its security. This seems to be the case with responses to questions of trust in other parts of the public sector, which are significantly lower.
To download a copy of Circles of Trust: How the U.K. Public Perceives Digital Risk, visit: https://utimaco.com/survey-how-trust-works-digital-world
