Public perceptions of privacy and security

Danny O’Leary

Computer Security Assignment 1 Danny O’Leary 20067817 Computer Forensics and Security

Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era, The Pew Research Center

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Danny O’Leary

Contents Profile of Creator .................................................................................................................................. 3 Profile of Survey .................................................................................................................................... 4 Methodology ........................................................................................................................................ 5 Summary of Important Findings ........................................................................................................... 6 My review of the survey ....................................................................................................................... 9 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 10

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Danny O’Leary

Profile of Creator The Pew Research Center is an American company that focus on providing information on a number of different issues such as social issues, demographic trends and privacy issues. The company claim to do public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and also other social science research. The Pew Research Centre first started off in 1990 by creating a research project for the Times Mirror newspaper, but they went under the name Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. In 1996, the company became known as the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Since then the Pew Research Center has continued to make reports and are expanding into more topics. The Pew Research Center aims to inform the public about the issues, attitudes and trends all over the world. A lot of the Pew Research Center is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

(Pew Research Center, 2010).

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Danny O’Leary

Profile of Survey Overall, Pew Research Center seem to have a good history of high quality reports/surveys since 1990. The target audience for this Survey is targeted at Americans specifically and hopes to outline privacy perceptions and behaviours. This particular survey is the first of a series of 4 which came online between January 11th and January 28th 2014. The survey aims to examine Americans’ privacy perceptions and behaviours after the U.S government surveillance programs which were carried out by a government contractor Edward Snowden. The Pew Research Center has done a lot of Surveys on privacy in the past, but this is the first of this particular type of survey. The frequency of these Surveys plans to be one in January of 2014 and then it’s to be followed by 3 others later in the same year. For this survey the Pew Research Center went through a number of different topics: 1.

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Americans’ Perceptions of Privacy are Varied Public Confidence in the Security of Core Communications Channels is Low Few Feel that the Government or Advertisers can be trusted Americans consider certain kinds of data to be more sensitive than others Most would like to do more to protect their personal information online

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Methodology This survey began in June of 2013. To carry this out, the Pew Research Center got a panel of 607 adults who are members of the Gfk Knowledge Panel. The Gfk Knowledge panel is a panel which is based on a random sample of the US and it is because of this that they are considered to be accurate (Gfk.com, 2015). As well as that, 26 of the panel participated in an online focus group as part of the study. Originally Gfk had selected a representative of 1537 English-speaking panellists to join the panel. From this number 935 actually responded, which was 60.8% of the original amount selected and of this 607 accepted the invite which was a 64.9% acceptance rate. These 607 people have agreed to carry out four online surveys in the space of a year.

KnowledgePanel members are recruited using probability sampling methods and it includes lots of different types of people, some which have internet access, some who do not and internet access is provided for those who do not. Some of the methods that they use for recruiting are: 1. Random Digit Dialing: This method is simply using random digits to generate phone numbers and using these people for help depending if they give consent or not.

2. Address-Based Sampling: This method uses Address’s from databases to pick the people and using this also depends if the person is willing to do the survey or not.

KnowledgePanel is always recruiting new people throughout the year for people that may leave the survey during the year. All the members that were chosen for this particular survey were emailed on January 10th with a link to the questionnaire, with a follow up email three days later with a reminder for those who had not submitted the questionnaire yet.

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Summary of Important Findings According to the summary of important findings when it comes to Americans privacy is an area where some Americans having a concern of their privacy over surveillance of communications. Other Americans have no concerns over their privacy because of Civil Liberties. Usually when a question is asked like what is privacy? , there is a trend to their answers. From the diagram below you can see that many Americans believe that privacy is about keeping things hidden and having notions of secrecy.

In the summary of important findings, the Pew Research Center also claim that most Americans are aware of government effort to monitor communications. It’s been over a year since government contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents regarding widespread government surveillance by the NSA. From the survey, Pew Research Center found out that 43% of adults have heard a lot about the surveillance from the government by collecting information about telephone calls, emails and other online communications as an effort to stop terrorist threats. 44% of adults have heard a little about this and 5% of them haven’t heard anything at all about it.

Another thing that the survey analysed was the widespread concern about surveillance by government and businesses. One of the biggest findings of the survey overall was the lack of confidence that the Americans have about having control over their own personal information.

Some of the information that they found out was that 91% of adults agree that people have lost control over how much information is being collected about them. 88% of adults agree admit that it is very difficult to remove information that is already online about them that is not true or inaccurate. 80% of adults are concerned that information that they post to social media sites is used by third parties. Sticking with the social media sites, the survey shows that 70% of social media users say they are concerned about the government potentially accessing information that they have posted on a social media site.

Then the survey goes with the topic of if Americans could be doing more about regulating what advertisers do with their information. 80% of the survey agreed that Americans should be concerned about how the government could be monitoring phone calls or internet communications. 64% of the survey felt like the government should be doing more to regulate advertisers. The survey asks about

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Danny O’Leary the following statement “It is a good thing for society if people believe that someone is keeping an eye on the things that they do online.” To which 34% agreed.

The survey then goes onto talking about the commercial aspect and how consumers are sceptical about how some data is shared. The survey gave the statement “I appreciate that online services are more efficient because of the increased access they have to my personal data.” 61% of the survey disagreed with it. 55% of the survey did agree with another statement that reads “I am willing to share some information about myself with companies in order to use online services for free.”

The next thing that the survey went through was going through how the American public feel is secure and what is not. This can be seen with the following graph:

From the graph, it shows that they feel that a landline is the most secure and using social media sites is the least secure.

The survey then moves onto what the American public think if they should be doing more personally to protect their privacy. 61% of the survey feel like they could potentially do more. Regarding if they feel if they can be anonymous online 24% of the survey feel like it is possible to be anonymous online.

The survey also comes to the conclusion that not everyone monitors their reputation online, but they feel others will check their digital footprint. 62% of the survey have used a search engine to look up their own name to see what information is available online about them. 6% of adults have an automatic alert for when their name is mentioned online.

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Danny O’Leary The survey then goes on to talk about how people use usernames or their actual names or just totally anonymous. 59% of people have used a username to post comments that could be associated with them. 55% have done this with their real name and 42% believe to have done so totally anonymously.

The next graph is how the survey suggests that the American public sees the different levels of sensitive information:

The last thing that the survey goes through is that 11% of people say they have had embarrassing or inaccurate data posted online about them. 16% of people have asked to have information removed about them online.

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My review of the survey I think that the survey was very comprehensive, it had 59 pages where it went through each part of the survey comprehensively. It starts off with a little about the report and the company, it moves on to the summary of findings which alone is pretty detailed having 6 pages for the summary. It has a 3 page introduction discussing privacy in detail since the time Edward Snowden leaked government information in 2013. It then proceeds to have some of the research carried out from the survey which is also in great detail with use of graphs and diagrams for most. The actual survey has a lot more detail than the summary of findings where it was kept very basic, but in the survey it went into a lot more detail about the kind of people that agreed with points of the survey e.g. male or female.

I also think that the survey does provide useful information to readers in some ways because it is shedding a lot of light on the fact that people are aware of privacy issues, but aren’t doing anything about it. I don’t think it would be useful for every reader since a lot of readers may already be aware that these privacy issues exist. Overall I found personally that the survey did provide information that I didn’t already know and it makes it clear that something more should be done about these types of issues since people don’t think they have privacy in most things especially things like social media and mobile phones. I think it also shows what the effects that the revelations about the United States government surveillance programs by Edward Snowden have on government trust and also privacy in general because people will see it as if the government can do it, what about other companies?

The survey could be seen as a marketing tool because the survey has lots of references to the Pew Research Center and a few to the Pew Charitable Trusts which in turn is free advertising to both the companies and it is what they rely on with these surveys to get people to read other surveys that they produce. Regardless of it being used as a marketing tool, I think that the Pew Research intend to do this, but it is a reasonable way of using the survey as a marketing tool without taking away from the quality whatsoever.

However I do think that the survey has a few short-comings. I think one of the major short-comings that this survey has is that it is the first of the surveys and from here they will probably improve their information. Another short-coming that I think the survey has is that it’s just based around America and not around the world because I think that it would be a lot more informative if it was based on the world rather than America alone.

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Danny O’Leary

Bibliography 

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Gfk.com, (2015). GfK KnowledgePanel. [online] Available at: http://www.gfk.com/us/Solutions/consumer-panels/Pages/GfK-KnowledgePanel.aspx [Accessed 4 Mar. 2015].

Pew Research Center, (2010). About Pew Research Center. [online] Available at: http://www.pewresearch.org/about/ [Accessed 5 Mar. 2015].

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