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Privacy Fears Deterring Almost Half of American Households From Online Shopping (bbc.com)
Many Americans are growing increasingly concerned about privacy and security. According to a survey, almost half of American households with at least one Internet user have been deterred from online activity recently. The online activity includes doing online transactions, banking, and posting things on social media, said the survey of 41,000 households by a Department of Commerce agency. BBC reports: When respondents were asked what concerned them the most about online privacy and security, 63% said identity theft. The respondents, who were allowed to give multiple answers, also cited credit card or banking fraud (45%), data collection by online services (23%), loss of control over personal data (22%) and data collection by the government (18%); 13% also said they were concerned about threats to personal safety. The data suggested 19% of US online households had been affected by an online security breach in the previous year. The NTIA said this represented about 19 million American households.
They can simply do open WLANs which the phones log in to or detect you when you don't pay with cash. And one thing almost nobody hides when they go to a shop: their face. Camera face tracking technology is almost free these days, the shops can monitor you almost as good as online shops can.
Whenever I search for something on Amazon, it stalks me all around the web. I searched for the word "tarp" once (someone asked me how much they usually cost) and for several weeks afterwards, every web site on the planet was showing me ads for tarps- from Amazon and from other shady tarp-sellers. It's just creepy. What if you're at work and your laptop keeps displaying ads for stuff like this? I don't really like firing up IE just to find crap on Amazon. That's just too high of a price to pay.
Web browsers have come the modern equivalent of the telescreens in Orwell's 1984- but Orwell never realized how popular telescreens would be. ("Big Brother gave me this new telescreen and it's huge, 2 mm thinner, comes with a front side camera, and I get an exercise instructor to monitor my fitness!")
You need to convince the bank that any transactions between its being compromised or stolen and your notifying them were not in fact yours. Good luck with that. I would not notice a fraudulent charge until the next monthly statement
I'm not sure where you live, but in the US it's quite easy: most banks allow you to simply mark one or more particular charges as fraudulent using their online banking website. Otherwise, you can report the card as lost/stolen using the website or by calling them. One time, ten years ago, they sent me a form I had to sign and mail back (at their expense) to attest that the charge was fraudulent. Took me about 30 seconds. The one other time I've reported it since then, it was all online with no paperwork. The one time the bank caught it before I did, no paperwork was necessary: they called me, described the suspicious transaction, I confirmed it was fraudulent, and they handled it from there.
There's never been any adversarial questioning or anything from the bank, it's simply routine.
But you sound as if your cards are often compromised, lost or stolen, so it's all the more suprising if your bank cancels the fraudulant charges at the drop of a hat. You must have such a reputation with them that I wonder why they don't cancel your contract instead.
It's happened to me three times in 15 years, never through any fault of my own. I'd hardly consider that "often" or somehow deserving of a "reputation". Even if it was somehow considered excessive, I find it hard to believe that a bank would drop a long-time client simply because they were frequently the victim of crime.
In each case, it's been quite obvious that the charges were unusual and fraudulent: As an example, when my card was compromised one time I lived in Arizona and I regularly made various routine charges (e.g. groceries, gas, food, etc.). It didn't really make sense that my card was used to buy $300 worth of gasoline at a gas station in Florida 20 minutes after I bought my regular groceries in Arizona, so the bank flagged the transaction and called me. Another time it was used to buy household appliances in some distant state I'd never visited to be delivered to an address I had no connection with whatsoever.
Either way, dealing with the aftermath of the fraudulent credit card usage was only the most minor inconvenience. I don't understand why people get so worked up about such things: I'd be more concerned with my name, address, and other account details getting leaked since those can't be changed as easily (if at all).
Err... you do know how statistical sampling works, don't you? If a bin holds a thousand widgets, and 50 of the first 100 randomly selected widgets are defective, you can by 95% certain that the number of defective widgets in the bin is between 450 and 550.
41,000 households is not a small sample. The big question is to what degree the sampling methods are biased rather than random. But unless the sampling method is astonishingly and probably obviously bad, the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of households are sufficiently worried enough about privacy to curb their online shopping.
On the other hand -- half of all households who do shop online is still a lot of households. Plenty to support a lot of online retailers.
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