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By 6 April 2021 | Categories: news

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New research from the the NordVPN’s National Privacy Test shows South Africans lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to our understanding of online security and privacy issues. South Africans who completed the test scored 55.3%, which is 9.9 points lower than the global average, and 15.9 points below the Germans, who managed the best at 71.2%. Out of 21 countries on the list, South Africa placed 16th, just above Russia. 

NordVPN's test results also show South Africans have slightly lower skills when it comes to knowing how to react to online threats and phishing attacks, scoring 78.6 points out of 100, which is 5.6 points lower than the global average.

Sadly, when it comes to maintaining healthy habits online and knowing the basics of how to protect themselves from attacks in the first place, South Africans are significantly lagging behind.

Respondents from South Africa scored 36 points on their digital habits, which is 2.1 points below the global average, and 60.3 on their theoretical knowledge in cybersecurity, which is below the global level by a stunning 11.9 points. The sum of these three dimensions is reflected in the National Privacy Score, which is 55.3 points out of 100. This is lower than the global average by a staggering 9.9 points.

These findings are based on responses of hundreds of South Africans who took the NordVPN’s National Privacy Test, which measured the knowledge and skills in cybersecurity of 48 063 respondents from 192 countries.

Social media: heavily used unknown creature

Out of all misconceptions associated with cybersecurity, South Africans fell for social media the most. NordVPN believes a staggering number of people (68.2%) said they don’t know that Facebook is able to gather data about them even if they don’t have an account.

Moreover, 52.2% of South African residents admitted they would share their personal details like full name, email, phone number, or even their current location on social media, while globally only 18.7% admitted to behaving the same way.

“People want to tell compelling stories on social media but forget about oversharing,” says Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN.

One field where South Africa demonstrated its strength was knowing exactly how to react when notified about an unknown device trying to log in to their email account. As many as 89.8% would change their password and set up multi-factor authentication immediately.

Who’s the best in the race?

According to the research by NordVPN, 9 out of the top 10 countries with a strong digital privacy awareness are European countries, with Germans being the first (71.2 out of 100), the Dutch second (overall score of 69.5 out of 100), and Switzerland third (68.9 out of 100). These findings confirm the conclusions by Cousera, which names European technology skills as cutting-edge.

Methodology

NordVPN launched an open-access survey National Privacy Test in November, 2020. 48 063 respondents from 192 countries responded to 20 questions that evaluated their online privacy skills and knowledge. Drilling down to an individual country level, analysis was performed only on countries where the number of respondents was higher than 400.

The global ranking of countries by their performance in the National Privacy Test

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