If given an option to choose between privacy and convenience, 61% of Indians will opt for convenience, ditching privacy.
This startling revelation was discovered when IT infrastructure company EMC conducted a survey called “EMC Privacy Index” which actually tries to find consumer perception and attitudes towards data privacy.
The findings of this unique Index tell us how much a consumer is willing to trade his privacy for convenience. EMC contacted 15,000 Internet users from 15 countries in order to correctly predict the inter relation between privacy and convenience and India has ranked #1 among all 15 countries when it comes to trading privacy with convenience.
This finding is actually an alarming trend among Indians: we are not concerned about our privacy!
On the same hand, 51% Indians believe that they have less privacy as of now, compared to last year and 59% expect that privacy and personal data protection will decrease in the next 5 years. Another very interesting finding: Indian men are more inclined to open up their private life online, compared to women. 59% Indian women refused to trade their privacy for convenience meanwhile only 43% Indian men refused the same.
Globally, only 27% of respondents said yes to trade privacy for convenience.
This willingness among Indians to ignore privacy is not uniform among every segment of users. For example 70% of Indians who are interacting with Government bodies are willing to compromise their privacy meanwhile 63% of Indians interacting with medical bodies agree with this trade-off.
Even among the most hardcore social media users, only 52% are saying yes to privacy compromise, which is still way above of global average (27%)
Take No Action Privacy Paradox
The most alarming trend which was captured by EMC during the survey was the “Take No Action Privacy Paradox”. It was found that 64% of consumers have infact experienced an instance of data breach and data theft but still decided not to report it or take any action.
On the same hand, 21% never read any privacy statements; 41% never change a password; 21% never change any privacy settings on their social network and 28% don’t have any password on their mobile!
Another aspect of this paradox: 84% of Indian social media users have admitted that they don’t want any organization or person to know about their spending behavior online, but still they don’t do anything to protect their privacy online.
It seems that awareness and education is the thing missing among net savvy Indians. They should be made aware about the dangers such data theft and data breach bring to the overall financial, social and personal lives of the users.
You can find the results of the survey here.
