[LINK] RFC: Are 2m adult Australians locked out of online services?

[Roger Clarke]

As a non-mobile-phone user, I'm astonished how many organisations are 
completely unprepared for non-mobile-phone users, and completely 
uninterested in providing services to them.

I'm particularly concerned about services that require two-factor 
authentication, and support SMS as the only means of doing so.

A quick check of some readily-available stats suggests that this may 
appear to affect *a small proportion* of the population;  but that may 
represent *substantial numbers* of people.

I'd appreciate a sanity check of the brisk 15-minute analysis below.


In Dec 2018, Deloittes reported:
https://www.consultancy.com.au/news/616/9-out-of-10-australian-citizens-now-own-a-smartphone
 > 89% of 2,000 Australians surveyed now own a smartphone, up from 88% 
in 2017 and 84% in 2016.

In Jul 2019, Roy Morgan reported:
http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8032-mobile-phone-trends-march-2019-201907010451
 > the vast majority of Australians (89.9%) own a mobile phone. This is 
up 0.7% points on a year ago and up 2.1% points from two years ago.


Note that there's a difference between 'mobile phone' and 'smartphone'.

And those reports don't contain the following important info:

(1)  what's the definition of 'Australians'?

      It probably means 'people who we reached'.  But that's unhelpful.
      We need to know the sampling frame, so that we can work out
      who's included and who's excluded and how reliable the statistic is

(2)  what proportion of respondents without a smartphone have access
      to a large sub-set of smartphone services by means of a tablet?

(3)  what proportion of respondents without a smartphone have access
      to a *small* sub-set of smartphone services by means of what
      Deloittes call a 'standard mobile phone'?


Ownership of smartphones appears to be asymptoting to c.91%.

If we assume that 'Australians' means 'all persons present in Australia 
at any given time and who are 18 or older and not institutionalised' ...

... then most of 9-10% of the population may not be able to use services 
that (a) require second-factor authentication and (b) only support SMS.

That includes Internet Banking services with quite a few of the banks. 
Some of those support login, but constrain such customers to very low 
daily payment-amounts when using Internet Banking.

Let's assume the relevant population is 20m (80% of 25m).

Applying 9-10% to 20m ...

... up to 1.8-2m Australians are locked out of SMS-based authentication

A great many of those may fall into categories who are not well-educated 
in commercial matters, living in remote areas, socio-economically 
disadvantaged, etc.


(A separate analysis is needed of contingent lock-out from services. 
Lots of people run out of battery.  And there are many locations, and 
many circumstances, in which SMS-capable handhelds are unable to receive 
an SMS;  and, in a reasonable proportion of those locations and 
circumstances, the user may have Internet access from a desktop or 
laptop via cable, fixed-wireless or satellite).


-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA 

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University