Digital Safety: Awareness
Understand what digital safety means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Your digital life is one of the most under-protected parts of your existence. Most people store sensitive financial, medical, and personal information across dozens of online accounts, yet fewer than half take basic steps to secure them.
The consequences of poor digital safety are tangible. 85% of data breaches involve human factors – meaning they happen because of something the victim did or failed to do, not because a hacker broke through advanced defences. Identity theft, financial fraud, and privacy violations affect roughly a quarter of the population at some point.
The good news is that a handful of straightforward measures can dramatically reduce your risk. Enabling two-factor authentication, for instance, prevents 99.9% of automated account attacks. Using a password manager makes credential theft substantially less likely. These interventions require modest effort to set up and minimal ongoing maintenance.
Beyond preventing harm, good digital safety practices give you confidence to use online services – banking, healthcare portals, cloud storage – without the nagging worry that you might be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.
People approach digital safety with different priorities. This site scores every digital safety intervention across two core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these two values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Comprehensive Security
Minimising exposure to cyber threats, data breaches, privacy violations, and digital fraud through systematic security measures, privacy controls, and threat awareness. People who lean towards this value focus on thorough protection across devices and platforms, proactive security practices, and evidence-based methods for reducing digital risk – even when that means accepting some inconvenience or reduced functionality.
Usability and Convenience
Maintaining digital functionality and ease of use whilst achieving reasonable security. People who lean towards this value seek protective measures that integrate into existing digital workflows without excessive friction, complexity, or technical barriers. They want to keep using their preferred platforms and services without security getting in the way.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each digital safety value:
Micah Lee is a technologist and journalist who served as a technical adviser to Edward Snowden and helped establish The Intercept's secure communication infrastructure. He develops and maintains open-source security tools including OnionShare, practises rigorous operational security in his own digital life, and has written extensively about practical threat modelling for non-experts. His work demonstrates that comprehensive personal security can be maintained consistently over many years.
Troy Hunt is the creator of Have I Been Pwned and a long-time advocate for making security accessible to ordinary users. He uses and publicly documents a streamlined personal security setup – password manager, hardware security keys, automated monitoring – that provides strong protection with minimal daily friction. His writing consistently emphasises practical, low-effort security measures over comprehensive but burdensome approaches.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to check.
Comprehensive Security
Usability and Convenience
General Awareness
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published cybersecurity survey data for the general population. General Awareness items are recorded for your awareness but not scored, as the available data does not support reliable percentile estimates.
You now understand why digital safety matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about comprehensive security versus usability and convenience. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Digital Safety. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions