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USA Today on Fear of Credit Cards over Net
USA Today reports in its 9/20/95 edition, on the front of the Money section,
that "Few Feel Safe Making On-Line Transactions". A survey of 427 "computer
users" by USA Today and Intelliquest yielded the results below.
[The article doesn't say whether the survey was conducted before or after
news of the bad seeds hit. <sigh>. I only bought USA Today because my best
friend gets her 15 minutes of fame below the fold on page 7D of the Life
section today.]
I'm not sure exactly what "sending a credit-card number to a commercial on-
line service" means. Apparently it's seen as slightly safer than phoning it
in, but much riskier than snail-mailing it in to an ISP.
How much do PC users trust:
Automatic teller machines 77%
Banking by phone 62%
Banking by computer 57%
Using a credit card or calling
card at a public phone 57%
Writing a credit-card number on
a catalog order form 43%
Sending a credit-card number to
a commercial on-line service 34%
Giving a credit-card number
over the phone 31%
Sending a credit-card number
over the Internet 5%
(margin of error = +/- 4.7%)
Raph also gets mentioned, mainly for "human interest" I'm afraid :/
Even those familiar with the Internet do not routinely use it for
financial transactions. Raph Levien -- a computer science Ph.D.
candidate reached via Internet -- says he has only used his credit
card once over the Internet. About a year ago, he bought three CDs:
Best of Alan Parsons Project, Enya and Beethoven's Ninth. Levien is
a member of the group cypherpunks, which announced on-line Sunday
night that hackers found the security flaw in Netscape's software.
Still, Levien says Netscape's system "is among the safest that
there is."
-Futplex <[email protected]>