26% Indians have shared OTPs with others, 22% have shared bank details: Survey

Indians still prefer offline transactions, don’t read terms and conditions and have shared OTPs with others. We aren’t surprised, though.

There are enough warnings and precautions hanging all over the world wide web, that advise you to not share your phone number, personal address, sensitive credit/debit card information and obviously OTPs with anyone online. However, you would be surprised to know that 52% of Indians have publicly shared their personal phone number and addresses online. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

There are enough warnings and precautions hanging all over the world wide web, that advise you to not share your phone number, personal address, sensitive credit/debit card information and obviously OTPs with anyone online. However, you would be surprised to know that 52% of Indians have publicly shared their personal phone number and addresses online. According to a recent survey, most of the Internet-using population in the country tend to neglect basic cyber hygiene practices.

Basic suber hygiene practices include not giving away personal information online, in case you were wondering.

According to the survey, 26% of Internet-users said that they have shared sensitive OTPs (one-time pin/passwords) with others and 22% of all respondents who took part in the survey admitted that they had shared their bank account passwords, UPI pin, credit and debit card details with others.

The survey also indicated that only 48% wanted to report a fraud if they fell prey to it. The same percentage of people also accepted that they had not exercised basic precautionary measures online and had also not read safety privacy tips and terms on websites and apps before using them.

About 73% of the respondents said that they had actively skipped reading terms and conditions/safety and legal guidelines online before accepting/agreeing to things since reading the 'fine print' was too cumbersome and they did not think they would understand it.

The survey also revealed that though India's digital-first push has been rather positive and we have covered tremendous ground in the last decade, the majority of the people in India still prefer offline transactions. And if they are doing anything online that involves money, it is mostly restricted to money transfers, online shopping and paying bills.

The survey was carried out by OLX and the results were shared as the 'OLX 2020 Internet Behaviour Study' ahead of Safer Internet Day that falls on February 11.