Since 1994, NTIA has regularly commissioned the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct surveys on Internet use. In the latest survey, which went into the field in November 2017, over 43,000 of the more than 52,000 interviewed households reported having at least one internet user, and those internet-using households were asked the privacy and security questions.

An analysis of the 2017 data reveals that the decrease in reported privacy and security concerns was driven in large part by a reduction in the number of households specifically naming identify theft as a concern. Fifty-seven percent of online households cited identify theft as a major privacy or security concern in 2017, compared with 63 percent in 2015. In contrast, households named credit card or bank fraud, data collection by online services, loss of control over personal information, and other concerns at nearly the same.

The survey also found that internet-using households with federal employees were twice as likely as their peers (36 percent vs. 18 percent) to report in 2015 that they had experienced a breach during the past year, and were more likely to report all categories of deterred online activities and all major privacy and security concerns. In particular, 69 percent of households with federal employees reported identity theft concerns in 2015, compared with 63 percent of other online households, and households with federal employees were 4 percentage points more likely than their peers to say they did not post on a social network due to privacy or security concerns (30 percent vs. 26 percent). By 2017, the gaps between online households with and without federal employees had narrowed significantly. The proportion of online households with federal employees reporting a security breach in the past year declined to 28 percent in 2017, while that figure rose slightly to 20 percent among other households. And the previous gaps in privacy and security concerns and deterred activities nearly disappeared.

Both surveys showed that households that experienced a security breach—whether they had federal employees or not—were more likely to say they had concerns about privacy and security risks. For example, in both 2015 and 2017, 70 percent of Internet-using households affected by a security breach expressed concern about identity theft. In contrast, households that were not victims of a breach were significantly less likely to name identity theft as a concern in both 2015 (62 percent) and 2017 (54 percent).

Moreover, online households that had experienced a security breach during the past year continued to be more likely to have refrained from certain online activities. For example, 33 percent of online households reporting a breach said in 2017 that they had declined to conduct a financial transaction on the Internet at some point during the past year, compared with 22 percent of those not reporting a breach. While the 2017 survey showed a decline in avoided online activities across the board compared with 201, there continued to be large gaps between those households that had experienced a breach and those that had not.