Two-thirds of Brazilians fear interacting with strangers online, says Datafolha

Research Datafolha reports: 65% of Brazilians think it is not safe to talk to strangers on social networks; another 30% rate it as a little safe. The fear is greater than sharing personal content such as photos and videos, activities considered unsafe by 43% and a little safe by another 42%.

The result seems to reveal a certain misunderstanding of the user about the digital world. Interacting with strangers on the internet is not necessarily risky. The problem is exposing personal information that can help fraudsters, as Fabio Assolini, director of research in Latin America at Kaspersky, a digital security company, recalls.

When posting on a social network, the user necessarily exposes some data. It can be the location of the photo or the people who appear in it. Part of this is because digitally generated files, such as photos and videos, contain underlying information not always perceived by those unfamiliar with the technology. It is the metadata, which allows, for example, to determine the place where the photo was taken, even if the author does not disclose it.

If you want to keep it confidential and don’t know how to delete the metadata (which requires some technical expertise), it’s better to limit sharing, recommends the expert.

The insecurity in digital interaction with strangers surpasses even that of activities involving financial data. Shopping over the internet was considered unsafe by 35%, in a technical tie with digital banking transactions, with 34%. On the other hand, it was the banks that obtained the highest percentage of trust, although the index is modest: 28% of Internet users rated the services as very safe.

Perhaps these numbers take into account that, in cases of fraud, users of these services are protected by the Consumer Defense Code and whoever provides the service can be held responsible.

In recent years, however, the Pix payment system has fueled a series of new financial frauds, which the public, banks and authorities are not yet fully prepared to deal with.

In 2021, the Central Bank implemented a series of changes to the Pix rules to increase the security of the system after a significant increase in scams, kidnappings and other crimes. Among them is the blocking of operations considered fraudulent.

In this aspect too, many users have an unrealistic conception of insecurity, warns Assolini. “Brazilians fear that someone could hack their WhatsApp, which would be traumatic, but they don’t worry about something that could cause even greater damage, the tendency to repeat the same password in many places. compromised.” And the web isn’t exactly good at forgetting things, once the data is exposed, it’s hard to repair the damage.

In all categories of the survey, women appear as more suspicious than men. The level of trust grows as the income and education of respondents increase. The opposite happens with age: the older you are, the less confident you are in the online world.

On the issue of privacy, among the analyzed categories, the one that most disturbs the interviewees is the possibility of having their conversations or messages accessed by companies and social networks, a concern expressed by 77% of internet users.

Behind the indexes appear two related issues: 68% are concerned about how companies keep their personal data and 64% fear that their preferences and habits are used to sell targeted advertising. In practice, both are part of the same process and depend on the same factor, the system for protecting the information collected.

“Perhaps there is a perception that listening [conversas pessoais] be more serious because it reminds us of espionage, but everything is part of the same flow of data that the company will hold on the user”, evaluates Bárbara Simão, coordinator of the privacy and surveillance area at InternetLab, a research center in the areas of law and technology. “Everything leads to guard. If the company is capable of listening, it is also capable of saving. The concern has to be how it protects that data.”