Even After NSA Leaks, Government Still Trusted Over Private Firms

cold fjord writes "Computing reports on a U.K. survey: 'Governments remain the organizations most trusted by the public to handle personal data, despite revelations about surveillance and data collection schemes by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the U.K.'s GCHQ and other governmental organizations around the world. That's according to research by accounting and consultancy firm Ernst & Young, which suggests that more than half of people — 55 per cent — say they're comfortable sharing personal information with central government organizations ... However, consumers are more wary about sharing their data with private companies. Just one-third told Ernst & Young that they're willing to share personal information with financial institutions, while one-quarter are happy to do so when it comes to their energy provider. Only one-fifth of those surveyed said they're comfortable sharing personal data with supermarkets. ... it was web firms that people were most claimed to be wary of sharing information with — fewer than one-in-10 said they were comfortable about sharing data with social networks, such as Facebook or web search engines like Google.'" Meanwhile, a pair of researchers have assessed the NSA's data gathering scheme and found, unsurprisingly, that it's probably not very cost effective (PDF). "Conceivably, as some maintain, there still exist some exceptionally dim-witted terrorists or would-be terrorists who are oblivious to the fact that their communications are rather less than fully secure. But such supreme knuckle-heads are surely likely to make so many mistakes — like advertising on Facebook or searching there or in chatrooms for co-conspirators — that sophisticated and costly communications data banks are scarcely needed to track them down."

choices

[Anonymous Coward]

- Would you rather be raped by an African or a Japanese guy?
- I prefer not to be raped!
- That choice is not available.
- Ok, kitte kudasai.

Even further

[s.petry]

The Study was done by sampling "whom" exactly? From TFA I see That's according to research by accounting and consultancy firm Ernst & Young, which suggests that more than half of people - 55 per cent - say they're comfortable sharing personal information with central government organisations, such as HM Revenue & Customs and the NHS. but I see no data on who was polled, what the sample rate was, etc...

99.28% of all statistics are manipulated to present a wanted message, 68.7% of those are made up on the spot, and 0.035% of them are actually correct.