Personal technology’s top positive sides:
- Improved ability to find cheaper products – 74%
- Advances social activism – 74%
- Innovation in business – 72%
- Ability to start a new business – 68%
- Education – 67%
- Productivity – 65%
- Economic opportunity – 64%
- Quality of life – 60%
- Transportation – 59%
- Arts and culture – 59%
Developing vs. developed countries
Developing countries are more open-minded towards technology-enables services like ODesk, Uber and Airbnb. Developed countries, on the other hand, prefer to stick to traditional services (in this example, employment agencies, taxis and hotels). Moreover, respondents from developed economies believe that traditional service continue to be better for both consumers and workers in the industry than their technology-based alternatives.
Developing and developed countries also differ in their opinion on the relations between technology and the media. Nearly half of consumers in developing economies think that personal technology has a positive effect on people’s trust in media. For developed countries, it is the vice versa situation – more than half of internet users there see mostly gadget’s negative impact on people’s trust in media. That is namely why developed countries, like Germany, the U.S. and France preferred to get informed through traditional media (TV, newspaper and magazines), whereas developing economies were more fond of social media.
Similar is the case when it comes to personal technology’s effects on fitness and children. Developed countries picked the negative side of the scale, while developing predominantly leaned towards the positive.
Many Benefits, One Major Concern
However, despite these minor differences in opinion, participants from all countries saw one main concern about personal technology – the lack of privacy. Most respondents shared that technology users need access better legal protections and more information on what type of personal information is collected about them.
Also, nearly 73% of all web users are worried that the information they store on cloud service is not protected. In addition to that, they believe that cloud platforms should be subject to the same privacy protections as personal information stored in the form of paper documents.
The report predicts that consumers’ privacy worries will continue to increase in the future.
