Online Trust Failing Overall

twitter writes "The BBC and ZDNet are reporting on an RSA poll of 1,000 users about failing confidence in ecommerce. 43% of respondents were reluctant to give details to online sites and 70% said that firms were not doing enough to keep their data secure. The BBC goes on to quote experts who back up the perception, ZDNet claims that action is being taken and is well."

Comments

Sheesh...

[14erCleaner]

Most people who distrust internet commerce will gladly hand their credit card over to minimum-wage waiters, who disappear into the back room of the restaurant with it for ten minutes. It's all a matter of image and perception.

Re:Sheesh...

[BitwiseX]

You beat me to this one. I would GLADLY use my CC over the internet before I would give it to a waiter, cashier, etc. There is little or no difference. Do you have any idea of knowing what happens to those CC slips your local Mom & Pop restaurant process daily? About as much as you have of knowing what happens to your CC# once you buy something at amazon.com. Why all the paranoia? 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. Put your faith in your CC company and their fraud prevention.

lots of large scale compromises lately

[ArbitraryConstant]

While I'm somewhat surprised the average user pays attention to such things, I'm not surprised trust is failing in light of recent large scale compromises.

Until the industry as a whole adopts a strategy of preventing compromises, this is not going to improve. Most companies would rather pay a PR guy to fix their image after the fact than a security consultant to keep it from happening in the first place. That's certainly not how I want my information taken care of.

Quotes from the BBC article:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Some [users] resort to using the same one for all their online accounts. Those who use several passwords often write them down and hide them in a desk or in a document on their computer.

Dear God, ain't this the truth??? I'm a network admin at a large company (please don't ask which), and the password situation here would be laughable if it weren't so sad. I ran LC5 on our hash file here, and was shocked and dismayed at the number of passwords cracked within 10 seconds. I'm constantly finding passwords on sticky notes on monitors and under keyboards, and many users haven't even bothered to change the default Lotus password ('password') to something else! >:(

Last year, a street survey found that more than 70% of people would reveal their password for a bar of chocolate.

That seems to be about the right figure for users in my company.

Case in point: ChoicePoint

[PHAEDRU5]

Here in GA we have ChoicePoint, a company which recently allowed a criminal gang to make off with something like half-a-million IDs.

Only people in California were notified of the leak, because CA has a law requiring notification. Everyone else is going to have to wait 'til their identity gets stolen.

The GA legislature is taking up a bill to require notification of GA residents when their personal information is stolen or accidentally leaked.

Part of the problem, IMHO, is that companies won't tell you when they've shared your information with a non-trusted third party. So, a good first step would be voluntary disclosure.