Consumers divided globally on whether to trade 5G speeds for privacy
- A new survey found consumers in China, India and Brazil have much greater willingness to trade-off privacy for superfast mobile networks
- There is also greater optimism in China that 5G will help narrow the digital divide between urban and rural communities
Consumers worldwide appear to have one big fear about the coming technological revolution in superfast wireless: 5G could be a harbinger of hacking and greater loss of privacy.
But according to a new POLITICO/Qualcomm 5G Global Survey of people in the United States and 10 other countries across Europe, Asia and South America, a global divide exists on how willing people are to accept a lessening of privacy in return for a new era of superfast networks and interconnected devices. And they differ sharply in whether they place greater trust in business or government to address the problem.
In the US, only 21 per cent of consumers surveyed would accept lower privacy standards in exchange for superfast speeds, which under 5G are expected to be up to 100 times faster than current speeds.
But consumers in China, India and Brazil expressed much greater willingness to make such a trade-off, a sentiment expressed by 64 per cent in the first two countries and 61 per cent in Brazil.
That split could portend serious differences internationally about what privacy guardrails to erect in the era of 5G, and a possible splintering across national lines regarding advertising policies and the ways in which these networks are monetised.