Privacy Concerns Are Driving People Offline

Constantly we report day after day of one security breach or a privacy concern affecting thousands as companies continue to suffer at the hacks of malware and hackers. If you’ve sometimes felt like you just want to remove yourself from the internet and live offline, you’d be one of many people who believe that it’s not worth the risk to go online.

The latest study from the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) asked 41,000 households about their online activity within the last year. The end result showed that 45% of households had started to refrain from performing one of the following actions while 30% said they refrained from more than one of the actions within the last year.

• 29% said they had stopped doing financial transactions online
• 26% said they had stopped shopping or buying services online
• 26% said they had stopped posting on social media
• 19% said they had stopped posting “controversial opinions” online

All of these actions came back from an underlying fear of privacy, with 63% percent saying that one of their concerns was identity theft while 45% responded saying that credit card or banking fraud was scary. 23% were worried about their data being collected by online services and 18% were concerned about data collection by the government.

In summary, the data seemed to suggest that around 19% of households within the US had been victims of online security breaches within the last year. What does it mean when going online has to come at a cost of your privacy and people choose to act offline in order to protect their money and identities?