Users Don't Care About Security

Here’s a secret: people don’t care about security.

They really don’t.

Telecompetitor quoted an interesting Junpier report, noting that people lack trust in services, devices and apps while at the same time use them.

I’d say that people don’t even deal or think about trust most of their time. Sure – put a question in front of a user about trust and security and you’ll get the answer that they care about trust. Who wouldn’t confronted with this question?

But at the end of the day – we don’t care.

We use a large and growing number of apps on our phones. Most of us relinquish the privileges requested by these apps without even checking what they are: children games that can use our phones to dial out, go to the internet for ads. Applications that devour our address book.

We don’t really care. And I don’t think users should care.

Who should care? Developers and product managers. People who are building apps and services. They should care.

This is why resources such as Troy Hunt’s blog are such great resources for developers and product managers. It shows how bad security is on the web today and what should be done about it. his recent post on website password reset mechanism was something I needed 3 years ago… nothing there is rocket science, but it does save the need of reinventing the wheel.

Next time you plan an app or a service – please take care of security. Users won’t care, but you should.

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Independent WebRTC analyst. I help companies ship real-time communications they can actually monitor. 20+ years in the comms space, last 13 focused on WebRTC.

More about Tsahi →

5 comments

Comments are closed. This discussion is kept as it was written.

  • Ori AlbinMay 29, 2012

    Nice one :-)

  • Dave MichelsMay 30, 2012

    I don't understand your links - the children's game and Path - are these evil apps or just poorly designed? What's your point of the links?

    • Tsahi Levent-LeviTsahiMay 30, 2012

      Dave,

      That's my whole point - poorly designed apps are the same as evil apps in a way.

      If I poorly design my login page or my password reset page, and that causes malicious attacks and loss of data, it simply means that I didn't take care of your security as the user.

      The same applies for children's games that try to use more than they really should, as there are implications to that - security ones.

  • PhilMar 1, 2019

    I'm coming to the conclusion that you are absolutely correct.