Even though the CSIA survey was completed almost 5 months ago, Time Magazine saw fit to reference one of the more salient findings in this week’s edition:

According to a recent survey by the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, an industry advocacy group, 48% of Internet users avoid making purchases online because they are nervous their financial information will be stolen. And with good reason—unauthorized use of online accounts has become the fastest-growing fraud in the United States, according to Gartner. More than $11.7 billion was lost to fraud among online adults in the year ending April 2004, the research firm says, and it estimates that by the end of 2006, 75 percent of the data stolen to commit illegal checking-account transfers and credit-card purchases will be taken from the Internet.

The article is about a new product intended to fight fraud on the Internet — in effect, a market response to the increasing lack of safety in e-commerce. The problem is, voters want government to get involved as well. In the survey, voters were asked which of the following statements they agreed with more:

Government needs to be responsible for making the Internet safe for consumers.

or

The Internet will always be safe because market forces will push out companies that take unfair advantage of their consumers.

More than 6 out of every 10 voters (61 percent) chose the first statement, while only 29 percent were confident that market forces would protect them. Clearly, voters want government to do something. And not doing something has serious economic consequences. This is only one of the reasons why I think “connectedness” will be a political issue of increasing significance in the election cycles to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Blog, CSIA, Connectedness, My Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.