• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 15, 2005

Nearly 70 percent of online consumers feel the online merchants they do business with are falling short when it comes to protecting their personal information, according to a survey released Monday by Bedford Mass.-based company RSA Security. The study found that 25 percent of online shoppers recognized that persistent security fears were crimping their shopping behavior.

Challenging the notion that an informed consumer is a happy consumer, 61 percent of respondents said they feel more informed about identity theft issues, and 23 percent noted that they feel more vulnerable than they did a year ago.

Twenty-one percent of consumers still refuse to use online banking, the survey found--sad news for a financial industry attempting to cut operational costs by converting customers to online banking.

The third annual study asked more than 1,000 U.S. consumers about how their attitudes regarding identity theft, computer attacks, and other security issues had changed over the past two years. The results were released to coincide with the annual RSA security conference in San Francisco this week.