September 9, 2010 by Alexei M
According to a new study conducted by security experts Norton, over twenty-five percent of people lie when they input their name and other personal details online. In addition, the report demonstrated that one in five people have behaved in a way that they subsequently regretted when it came to interacting on the web.
Norton undertook research to determine the behaviour of people who use the internet, studying the psychological consequences of use of the internet. They reported that over sixty percent of people have been targeted by some form of crime online, causing both financial and time problems as a result, but the largest proportion of online dishonesty is displayed by the respondents themselves.
According to the research, just under twenty percent of people conceal their age, marital status, financial circumstances or address, while just under ten percent have lied about their appearance. The “Norton Cybercrime Report: The Human Impact” study shows that almost sixty percent of UK web users have been targeted by cybercriminals, with an average of twenty-five days taken to resolve the problems. The crime costs people, on average, around one hundred pounds to resolve.
A spokesperson for security firm Symantec commented: “A lot of people, while they want to get information about other people on the web, they themselves would like to remain somewhat anonymous, to hide some of their own information so as to be not too easily identifiable on the web. I don’t think it’s always a bad thing but certainly people are trying to create a whole different identity for themselves for nefarious purposes.”
Most people surveyed felt that downloading a music track or film without paying for it was perfectly legal, and almost twenty percent stated that they felt it was appropriate to plagiarise content from other people’s websites. People confessed that they had posted up images of other people illegally, and a quarter of the people surveyed admitted that they had gone through another person’s browsing history without their permission.
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