Some gaps but no divide for gender in the cloud: F-Secure

By Digital News Asia August 28, 2013

Men take more frequent backups of their photos, videos and other content
Women share on Facebook more frequently, more concerned about security when uploading to cloud

IS THERE a gender divide when it comes to how people deal with digital content?

According to a recent F-Secure survey, men pay more attention to how much content they have than women do, but women are sharing it on Facebook more frequently.

When uploading content, whether for storage purposes or just for sharing with friends, Facebook tops the list for both, but women use it more, with 39% of women uploading content to the social networking site at least once a week, compared with 34% of men.

YouTube is next, and is slightly more popular with men, at 21% uploading content to it at least once a week, followed by 19% of women. For general Facebook use, women use the social network more than men, at 82% to 78%.

When Facebook users were asked about privacy settings, 23% of men and women agreed that they do not know how to configure their Facebook privacy settings to their desired level of privacy.

And when asked about their children’s Facebook privacy settings, males and females were again equally concerned, with 57% concerned that their children may not have the appropriate security and privacy settings.

In terms of how much digital content in terms of photos, videos, documents and other files they have on their devices, women are less likely to know, with 46% of women to 23% of men saying they don’t know. Compared with 12% of women, 23% of men say they have over 100 gigabytes of content.

In the case of data backups, 77% of men claim to back up their content to 75% of women. Of those, men are slightly more likely to use an online cloud backup service than women, at 25%, to 21% of women. The rest use hardware such as USB devices and CDs.

Men back up their content more frequently, at 33% taking backups at least once a week, to 25% of women.

Content storage in online cloud services begs the question of security, and women are slightly more concerned (61%) about unauthorised access to the content they store in cloud storage and backup services or social networking sites than men (57%).

According to the survery, both genders agreed that being able to access all of their content from any device would be useful.

In today’s multi-device scenario, 64% of women and 63% of men say it would be useful to have all their content accessible on all their devices wherever they are. And 60% of men and 59% of women agree it would be useful to be able to manage in one place all the content from the varied online services they use.

The F-Secure Digital Lifestyle Survey 2013 covered web interviews of 6,000 broadband subscribers aged 20–60 years from 15 countries: Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The survey was completed by GfK in April.