With the release of the iPhone 3G, movement on affordable mobile dataplans and a myriad of new entrants in mobile applications, it is interesting to look at perceptions around mobile data.
An interesting research piece from Unisys brings up the following statistics;
- worldwide there are 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers
- 71% of survey respondents (surveyed in 14 countries) would not consider using a mobile device to shop or bank
- 59% do not trust their mobile devices to provide a secure transaction
- Only 9% currently use their devices to process secure transactions
Overall what is interesting is that less than 10% of respondents trust a telecom provider to provide a secure transaction, but instead overwhelmingly favour banks to provide this functionality in a robust manner.
Clearly there is some advice that comes from all of this – Telco’s who want to be in this space should look at forming partnerships with trusted providers where the Telco provides the back-end technology but the trusted provider (ie bank) is the clearinghouse for the transaction.
Or will people’s fears about security reduce given time and increasing exposure to a mobile world?
This is really important to all those vendors out there cutting code. If you can’t prove the security model then you’re wasting your time and money. In this camp i’m lumping Xero and iPhone.. nice gimmick but what?
History repeats. In the late 90’s the net came, so did e commerce, and then the security threats… It got so bad that people were saying that the entire fabric of e commerce would be destroyed because of a lack of trust… that is no one would buy online…
Along comes a new network, ever increasing smart devices that can connect to that network and a stunning absence of security tools for those smart devices….