It is the demand of time that this change resists! A survey of users on this is eye-opening! Most major social media platforms now have a provision for account deletion. A recent survey by cyber security company NordVPN showed that personal financial data tops the list of information people want removed from the Internet. What remains secret is inevitable. In the present era internet is ubiquitous to our life, most of the moments are spent on it.
Now we wish we weren’t a part of it! A new study by cyber security company NordVPN shows that more than a third of people would remove themselves from the Internet if they could. The triggers for their delusions vary in nature. There are 45 percent who said there is no reason to have their name on the Internet, while 42 percent said they do because companies collect their data and use it for their own benefit.
Another 34 percent fear that someone will eventually hack their devices and 31 percent don’t trust the internet at all! The target group of the survey was residents of France, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Japan and South Korea. While it did not cover India, it is likely that the most active Indians on the net from countries around the world would have the same fear!
In extreme circumstances one may be inclined to choose to give it up altogether! Personal financial data tops the list of what types of information those surveyed want off the net, something we’re all guilty of sharing at some point without clearly understanding the risks of doing so. A good example is a bank account number sent to a child or credit card details shared with a vendor. But there is much to erase that is an equal priority for people.
In the early days of social media presence, there are many things that haunt people, from those now unloved or blurry pictures or videos uploaded to old dating profiles. Unfortunately can’t remove the pictures as they will draw more attention to what is already embarrassing and keeping them in place risks discovery by one more person. This is the kind of catch-all situation that people are willing to pay companies millions to subtly eliminate. The most popular solution in NordVPN’s study seems to be paying to use the internet anonymously all the time!
Last year e-communications company Reboot Online used an online analytics tool to find countries in which people are most likely to abandon social media, based on key online searches that show a strong intention to do so. India has emerged as the second ranked nation in the research paper produced by it! An average of 497,940 online searches per month by Indians indicate their desire to quit social media. Effectively 0.066 percent of India’s 75,582,000 active internet user base is eager to quit social media every month. It lags behind America, whose internet population is most likely to do so!
It’s a strange paradox, the love-hate relationship we have with social media. The average Indian spends about five hours a day on their phone, 70 percent of which is dedicated to social media. In which the number of girls and boys in the age group of thirteen to nineteen years is more. There can be no other event in history that has had such a profound impact on people’s lives! However, many young men and women want to wipe their slate clean with perhaps a single bitter experience of card hacks, obscene or abusive messages.
That’s why most social media platforms now have a provision for users to delete their account. In fact, this April Google announced that its search engine policy, which currently allows people to request the removal of sensitive content that could directly harm them, would be expanded to allow people to request the removal of additional information. Every now and then people express a desire to unplug and turn off the network, including those related to personal contact data such as phone numbers, email or physical addresses in search results. The funny thing is that most of these conversations happen on Twitter or WhatsApp or Facebook.