Would You Let a Survey Company Scan Your PC?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Would you give a survey company permission to scan the contents of your computer? Press coverage in Reuters, InformationWeek and a Yahoo Tech blog referred broadly to the study’s implications for all American computer users. But it struck me as unlikely that the subset who would agree to a remote scan would be representative when it comes to awareness of security threats on the Internet. A study released recently by computer-security company McAfee and the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance assumed the answer to the question was “yes.” The study asked 378 computer users about the kind of security measures they had in place, such as antivirus software and firewalls. It then used special software to scan respondents’ computers to see if those measures were really present, and found a gap between what people said, and what they had.