There seems to be no end to the various security breaches and cyberattacks that are resulting in people’s personal information being stolen, so understanding the types of data that people are most afraid of getting leaked can provide a lot of context about the kinds of security practices that they might be willing to follow. A survey conducted by Nord VPN has shed a lot of light on this subject, and the survey took responses from people all around the world.
People from eight countries were involved in this survey, namely Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands as well as Poland. Respondents from five out of these eight countries had very similar responses to one another, namely due to their focus on financial transactions being leaked in some way, shape or form because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up negatively impacting their ability to remain financially stable in the long term.
These five countries are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and France. 72% of American respondents said that they were worried about their financial data getting leaked. This percentage was even higher for Canadians, coming in at around 82%. Australia and the UK saw numbers that were a bit more similar to what we saw coming from US based respondents, coming up to 74% and 77% respectively.
The percentage of respondents that were worried about other kinds of data were relatively low for all of the aforementioned five countries. For online conversations, 32% of Americans said that they were concerned, and the percentages were 34%, 35% and 28% for Canada, Australia and the UK respectively.
The UK has an especially surprising low percentage of people that are concerned about their online conversations getting leaked, and all of these proportions indicate that the majority of people actually don’t care all that much about this kind of data getting into the wrong hands presumably due to the reason that there is not much damage that a malicious actor can do if they were to get their hands on this kind of data.
This relatively low proportion of people that are concerned about other forms of data such as personal pictures, browsing history and the like remained similar for all the countries that were surveyed, coming in at the mid 30s mark which indicates that people that are living in these countries seem to be in the same kind of headspace when these types of things are taken into account.
While this is by no means a definitive indication of where people’s preferences might lie in this regard, it could very well have an impact on the areas that tech companies choose to focus on when it comes to user privacy. Financial data seems to be the single most important form of data that people tend to want to protect, and with so many companies starting to give ecommerce a try the amount of financial data that they would start to receive would go up quite a bit as well. Hence, these companies will need to tighten things up since security breaches will become even more damaging than they have been previously.
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People from eight countries were involved in this survey, namely Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands as well as Poland. Respondents from five out of these eight countries had very similar responses to one another, namely due to their focus on financial transactions being leaked in some way, shape or form because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up negatively impacting their ability to remain financially stable in the long term.
These five countries are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and France. 72% of American respondents said that they were worried about their financial data getting leaked. This percentage was even higher for Canadians, coming in at around 82%. Australia and the UK saw numbers that were a bit more similar to what we saw coming from US based respondents, coming up to 74% and 77% respectively.
The percentage of respondents that were worried about other kinds of data were relatively low for all of the aforementioned five countries. For online conversations, 32% of Americans said that they were concerned, and the percentages were 34%, 35% and 28% for Canada, Australia and the UK respectively.
The UK has an especially surprising low percentage of people that are concerned about their online conversations getting leaked, and all of these proportions indicate that the majority of people actually don’t care all that much about this kind of data getting into the wrong hands presumably due to the reason that there is not much damage that a malicious actor can do if they were to get their hands on this kind of data.
This relatively low proportion of people that are concerned about other forms of data such as personal pictures, browsing history and the like remained similar for all the countries that were surveyed, coming in at the mid 30s mark which indicates that people that are living in these countries seem to be in the same kind of headspace when these types of things are taken into account.
While this is by no means a definitive indication of where people’s preferences might lie in this regard, it could very well have an impact on the areas that tech companies choose to focus on when it comes to user privacy. Financial data seems to be the single most important form of data that people tend to want to protect, and with so many companies starting to give ecommerce a try the amount of financial data that they would start to receive would go up quite a bit as well. Hence, these companies will need to tighten things up since security breaches will become even more damaging than they have been previously.
