Consumers voice ire over online security solutions

Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - 09:35 by Graham Miller

A new report from FICO has revealed the extent to which British web users are fed up with the hoops they have to jump through to carry out safe shopping online, or log into any other internet-powered service.

Sixty per cent said that they have grown tired of the fact that many sites now insist on the use of long, complicated passwords which combine letters with numbers and other symbols as a means of making them harder to crack.

Fifty per cent said that security questions designed to protect private data were holding up the process of accessing customer service platforms, while 43 per cent said that two factor sign-in was a big bug bear that they would prefer not to exist.

All of this suggests that while businesses may be battling to shore up their digital defences against cybercrime, their efforts are actually putting off consumers and could compromise the growth of safe shopping online in the UK.

Many experts argue that the age of password protection needs to come to an end in order to speed up online logins and authentication while also making e-commerce sites and web-based services more secure.

Using biometric data to verify the identity of a user, such as a fingerprint, retina scan or even facial recognition, is becoming increasingly common in the world of smartphones. However, with a lot of sales still made via desktop devices, this is not something that retailers can roll out universally quite yet.

Report spokesperson, Gabriel Hopkins, said that in spite of the security benefits that are made available thanks to the multi-factor protections and password restrictions which have become common today, consumers are struggling to come to terms with the inconvenience that these systems create.

Passwords are not going anywhere for the time being, but in the long run studies like this will surely by the catalyst for wider change.