Lockdown restrictions keeping people at home throughout the world resulted in a surge of signups to online shopping sites, streaming services, and other online services, new research shows.
According to data privacy service Mine, shared exclusively with Business Insider, the number of US consumers handing their personal info over – be it to streaming services, food delivery firms or other sites – surged by 60% between January and April.
Signups jumped even faster in France – 66% – compared to 51% in the UK, 46% in Israel, 42% in Italy, and 36% in Germany.
The five most popular services across all territories included Netflix, Spotify, Zoom, Disney+, and Twitch.
Local outriders include Doordash in the US, Trainline in the UK, and food delivery firm Wolt in Israel.
Mine says it uses "non-intrusive" machine learning algorithms to root out the companies flooding people's inboxes with promotions or other sign-up material. Users are then presented with a list of firms which currently hold their personal information, and can then send them an email requesting that their data be deleted with the click of a button.
"Around the world, people have been forced to spend more or all of their time online: they socialize and shop online, work and study remotely," said Gal Ringel, CEO of Mine.
"The bottom line is that we all leave much more of our personal and sensitive data over the internet during this crisis," he added. "We need to be more proactive and keep our data safe."
A surge in people using online services doesn't automatically mean that information will leak to malicious actors, but it does mean users need to take greater care not, for example, to reuse passwords across multiple services. Read Business Insider's guides on keeping your phone safe and on using password managers to keep your information secure.
