Austrians mix business with pleasure online

A majority of Austrians active on internet community portals do not keep their private and professional lives separate, according to new research.Career website Monster found 55 per cent of Austrians registered on Facebook and similar platforms use the services to connect both with personal friends and business partners.Monster stressed more than six in ten Germans (61 per cent) and Swiss (62 per cent) keep private matters and business links separated on the internet.These announcements come only days after Austrian Crime Office (BK) chief Gerhard Lang said the number of internet fraud and abuse cases reported in the country soared from just 22 in the first nine months of 2009 to 1,074 in the same period of this year.”Facebook is a great tool for many people, but it also poses many risks,” he said, adding that he expected the number of stalking and fraud incidents linked with online activities to soar further in the coming years.Speaking in Vienna, Adam Palmer of American software producer Symantec said recently that 79 per cent of internet fraud victims admitted to having no faith that investigations into their cases would bring any results.The online security expert said his team questioned around 7,000 people in 14 countries including Austria, France, Germany, and Canada for their 2010 “Norton Cybercrime Report”.Around two million Austrians are registered on Facebook, with hundreds of thousands of others using rival services like Xing, MySpace and studiVZ.