5. Trust online

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We’re trusting people, at least when it comes to internet transactions. Some 70% of Irish people think that internet transactions are either completely safe or rather safe. That puts us sixth-highest in a survey of the EU-27 countries. Only Finland (84% say safe), Denmark (82%), Sweden (78%), the Netherlands (78%) and the UK (76%) are more confident.

The EU average is 58% and the least-confident countries when it comes to internet transactions are Spain (only 35% said completely or rather safe), Slovakia (34%) and with the lowest confidence level, Bulgaria, where only 17% chose safe. Confidence seems to be related at least partly to usage. Countries with high “don’t know / not applicable” responses tended to have lower levels of usage. In this case familiarity breeds content.

Perhaps we are too confident. In the same survey, over 7% of Irish people said that they had given personal information to fraudsters operating “phishing” scams, the second highest rate among the countries surveyed. We also reported high levels of abuse of personal information (8%) and having computers taken over to become part of a “botnet” (6%) compared with other countries surveyed.

Source: Eurobarometer Confidence in the Information Society report, May 2009. Based on a sample of 12,799 at-home internet users aged 15 years and above across the 27 EU Member States. 500 persons were interviewed in Ireland. Figures do not add to 100% due to rounding

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 14