NEW DELHI: Adults in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region hide their private online activities and data more from their children, parents and spouse or partners than cybercriminals, Kaspersky found in an online survey.
The findings from the APAC region shows that 10.3% respondents are wary of sharing anything private with their children, 9.9% of them feel the same way about a partner or spouse and 9.1% didn’t want to share them with parents. In comparison the fear of private data falling into hands of cybercriminals worried only 3.1% of the participants.
“Ironically, online users in APAC are more concerned of having their blood relatives or relationship partners seeing or accessing their private data online way more than malicious actors. In fact, our survey showed cybercriminals are their least concern,” Stephan Neumeier, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky said in a statement.
Joel Yang, Clinical Psychologist of Mind what Matters in Singapore, feels this behaviour can be viewed through a cultural lens as most countries in this region have a collective family system.
Yang said collectivist attitudes typically encourage the correctness of social relationships and such ideals enforce hierarchy in family structure in which children are expected to show respect to their parents without question. This perpetuates the behaviour of parents not disclosing any private matters to children which may bring any question to the authority of the parent.
With regard to least concern towards cybercriminals, Yang said, “Through the same cultural lens, people place more trust in the governing bodies and believe that their interests will generally be taken care of.”
The survey further shows that 8.7% of respondents are afraid of sharing private information with the overall family in general, while 8.2% don’t want to share it with friends. Around 7.4% were skeptical about their employers and 7.7% about their peers at work.
Despite the recent reports of spying by governments and data mining by tech companies, many participants don’t seem alarmed at giving access to private data to them. Oonly 7.8% are worried about the government, only 6.4% are about social networks and 7.7% are about big tech firms like Google and Microsoft.
The findings were a part of a large global survey held in January-February by independent research agency Toluna. Around 15,002 individuals were interviewed in 23 countries and 3,012 of them belonged to the APAC region.
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