It’s true that lack of understanding is a major factor in people’s evaluation of relative risks(eg. you don’t want your credit card number stolen, so you are refusing to use the TLS-secured online order form and are instead giving your credit card number to an underpaid call center slave over an unencrypted phone line, where it’ll be dumped into the same database that will probably be breached and leaked within 18 months? Seriously?); but it’s a lot harder to argue that fear of bad things happening on the internet is a reflection of ignorance. They do. Frequently; and often with limited recourse and the customer left spending hours on hold trying to pick up the pieces.
The relative assessments tend to be egregiously ignorant(frets about being tracked online; dutifully swipes ‘loyalty card’ in store…); but the assessment that the internet is a dangerous place populated by predatory agents of typically superior knowledge and power is not really an artifact of ignorance, though inability to produce a coherent threat model is.
