Internet use at record level but Britons are lax about web security
Internet use in Britain has risen to record levels but there is a worrying lack of awareness around security, figures show.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found 89% of adults used the internet at least weekly this year, a rise of one percentage point on last year and up from 51% in 2006.
The proportion of adults who bought goods or services online also rose slightly to 78% – 25 percentage points higher than in 2008.
There has been a sharper increase in the number of people aged 65 and over shopping online, with almost half now making purchases on the internet, up from 16% a decade ago.
Clothes or sports goods were the most popular online purchase in the UK, bought by 55% of adults, according to the ONS. Household goods such as furniture and toys were the next most popular items, followed by holiday accommodation. All age groups were most likely to spend between £100 and £499, while the UK’s most frequent online shoppers are aged between 35 and 44.
Web spending accounted for about 18% of UK retail sales last month, which is about double the level of e-commerce recorded in the US.
Despite the ever-increasing reach of the internet – 90% of households had online access this year – the ONS found significant gaps in security awareness.
While smartphones are the most popular devices used to access the internet, with 78% of respondents doing so, just over a quarter (26%) of smartphone users said they did not have security installed and a further 24% did not know whether they did or not.
The ONS said: “This could potentially become a concern in the future due to lack of awareness surrounding the importance of security installation.”
Despite concerns about privacy online, particularly after the FacebookCambridge Analytica data scandal, the ONS found that of adults who used a smartphone, 31% of those aged 65 and over had refused access to personal data when using phone apps in the past 12 months. The figure was 65% among 16- to 24-year-olds.
Bill Buchanan, a professor of computing at Edinburgh Napier University, said: “The mobile phone is the danger for us. When you’re at home, you’re behind a firewall, you’re fairly well protected. There’s a much greater risk with a phone.
“With a mobile phone, someone can be tracking your location and they can even be turning on your camera or location tracker.
“You can track someone from birth to death these days and have a record of every minute of their life through Google searches. That’s pretty sensitive information and we have to understand that Google has that information.”
He said phone users were trusting Apple and Google not to provide their information to others.
While the proportion of people using the internet regularly and those shopping online show signs of plateauing, the viewing of videos on the internet has increased significantly since 2016. It rose from 29% to 46% on commercial services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, and from 47% to 62% on YouTube and similar platforms.
Email was the most popular internet activity this year, carried out by 84% of adults. Finding information about goods or services was the second most popular activity, at 77%, up from 71% last year.
Online banking was the activity that has shown the biggest percentage point increase over the past decade, from 35% in 2008 to 69% in 2018. “If you think about the risk there, you can lose a lot of money,” said Buchanan.
He warned that people were much more likely to fall for phishing emails and fake websites on a phone, where checking authenticity was not as easy.
“It’s difficult to create the security you would get on a desktop because you’re not in a constrained space,” he said. “What you really need is something that learns about you, what you like and don’t like, and what looks suspicious.”