An Investigation into User Perceptions of Privacy and Trust and their Real-World Practices

Internet security is a well-researched and understood topic. However, the concept of online privacy is a less well-defined issue, particularly with the advent of mass email and social networking interactions. This paper presents results from a user survey to determine perceptions of privacy and trust in online environments. Results suggest that users have oftencontradictory views of their privacy in the online world, but that the content of personal messages are perceived as the most sensitive data exchanged online. There is recognition of a number of security mechanisms available in the web domain. We go on to investigate personal messaging security in email. This is done by an investigation into the adoption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption facilities in Internet mail servers, split into a pilot study and larger-scale piece of work. Results show that the majority of email servers sampled utilise TLS and that this majority is only somewhat more than 60% of all servers tested.