Users aren't as savvy as they think

McAfee has a press release out discussing some study they did in which they tested people to see how good they were at deciding which sites were likely/unlikely to send them spam once they obtained a user's email address.

The quiz, launched August 15 by the McAfee® SiteAdvisor(TM) team, presented consumers with the homepages and privacy policy links of eight pairs of Web sites, and asked them to judge which site from each pair would likely guard their e-mail address. With more than 7,000 responses tabulated, the average score was only 55%, indicating that consumers are poor judges of which Web sites share e-mail addresses with third-party advertisers.

Of course, since this was seen in a press release and since McAfee sells products that supposedly helps stop spam/spyware, this would clearly have to call into question how accurate this information is, since McAfee stands to directly benefit from a "the sky is falling" scenario where users clearly must buy their software to protect themselves from... themselves.
That said, I'm pretty sure I agree that the average user has no clue.

Posted by Eric at September 27, 2006 11:08 AM | TrackBack