The number of active internet users has grown by 6.6% in 2014, almost reaching the threshold of 3 billion citizens of the planet, according to an ITU (UN) report cited by Time Magazine. The number of users has grown by almost 1 billion in the last five years. Today 40% of the world’s population has access to internet one way or another, the study says.
The number of internet users has doubled in the developing countries in the last five years. Still, internet access is not something available to the majority of the world’s inhabitants – there are still over 4 billion people who lack access to the global information network. Africa is the region with the slowest spread of the internet – only 19% of the inhabitants of the continent have at least some kind of access to the network. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nation’s specialized agency for information and communication technology is committed to bring the internet to further 1.5 billion people by the end of the decade. Their initiative, called Code 2020, is committed to expand mobile broadband access all around the world, and is supported by major internet companies like Google and Facebook.
According to the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust published yesterday by the Centre for International Governance Innovation and cited by Newsweek has found that 83% of internet users in 24 countries believe that access to the internet should be a basic human right. The same survey has revealed that most of them – 64% – are more concerned about their online privacy now as they were in 2013. According to Fen Hampson, director at CIGI’s Global Security & Politics Program, the citizens’ fear about security have moved from the physical world to include the virtual one. People have their photos, banking details and personal information stored online, and are increasingly concerned by having them stolen by hackers.