We may all connect to the same Internet, but we don't necessarily approach it in the same way. That's the conclusion of a report from Accenture, which commissioned a random phone survey of Internet users in the US and UK, focusing on how they got online and dealt with security issues, among other things. The survey suggests that there were significant differences between how people handled these issues based on where they lived and how old they were.

Accenture provided Ars with a summary of the data, which was obtained by a random sampling of broadband users that go online more than twice a week. The mean age of those who responded was 46. The total margin of error was 3.5 percent for the total survey population, and 4.9 percent for each nation. Neither a detailed population breakdown nor the statistical significance of any individual value was available, however, so these results should be interpreted cautiously.

With that caution out of the way, the results paint an interesting picture of how views on security differ based on age, gender, and national lines. Nearly 90 percent of the survey population felt that preventing identity theft was a personal responsibility. Provided it was some other person—they used identical passwords for an average of 4.5 accounts. In the UK, 70 percent managed to commit those passwords to memory, while only half of the US population could manage that feat. As a result, US citizens relied on writing passwords down at twice the rate of UK residents; women were more likely to write things down in both countries. In total, only seven percent managed to follow the recommendation that passwords be changed on a regular schedule.

The survey also looked at WiFi use in detail, as wireless communications are harder to secure. Just over half of the survey population used WiFi at home, with no apparent national difference. Younger and wealthier individuals were more likely to go wireless. Among the WiFi users, there was a large degree of trust in their security, as about two-thirds of them had sent sensitive information such as credit card details across a wireless network. The population under the age of 35 was likely to dismiss WiFi security concerns entirely: nearly a third have hopped onto unsecured networks while at home. US citizens were more likely to leech, and males had done so at rates over twice that of females.

The survey dipped in to a number of security and data integrity issues. Nearly everyone was using antivirus software, but about one in seven UK residents weren't bothering to keep it up-to-date (the figure was only five percent in the US). Only about a third of the survey population was performing a weekly backup, and a quarter wasn't bothering with this at all. The older and higher-income groups displayed more caution in this regard. Protecting files via encryption hadn't caught on. Only a quarter of users encrypted anything. To put these figures in context, four percent of British citizens had personally had laptops stolen; the figure was double in the US.

The breakdown of the numbers was somewhat frustrating; it would have been great to see how many individuals had sent credit card information across a neighbors unsecured WiFi router, for example. Despite the limitations, it pains a picture of callow youth (provided you allow "youth" to include the early 30s, a position most of the Ars' staff finds appealing). When it comes to technology, they're more willing to skip the backups and dive onto unsecured hotspots.