Global Privacy Fears Increase After NSA Leaks

The biggest impact whistleblower Edward Snowden has had may be the stricter privacy and cybersecurity precautions people around the world are taking after his leaks to the press about secret online surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency, a new survey shows.

[READ: Congress 'Endorses' Warrantless Collection, Storage of U.S. Communications]

Of the 60 percent of people surveyed worldwide who had heard of Snowden, 39 percent had increased efforts to protect their online privacy, according to a survey of 24 developed countries conducted by the Center for International Governance Innovation and market research firm Ipsos.

Forty-three percent of respondents also said they avoid certain websites and applications and 39 percent regularly change their passwords.

News reports about NSA surveillance surfaced last year and have included accounts of the agency spying on phone calls in foreign countries, employing agents to monitor online gaming communities and tapping network traffic between the data centers of companies like Yahoo and Google.

Likely because of such reports, 64 percent of survey respondents said they are more concerned today about online privacy than they were last year.

The survey also tallied the opinions of users about how the Internet should be governed, and 83 percent responded that affordable access to the Internet should be a basic human right. Basic Internet access has become more convenient with advances in smartphone technology that have helped boost online access from 2 billion people in 2009 to nearly 3 billion in 2014, according to a recent report from the International Telecommunications Union, a U.N. agency.

[ALSO: Will Surveillance Reform Get a Second Act?]

But that 40 percent of the world population with Internet access lives mainly in developed nations, as only 19 percent of Africa has access to the Internet, the agency said.

Governments did not receive a great vote of confidence in the survey, as only 48 percent of respondents said their leaders do a good job of keeping the Internet safe and secure. A slim majority of 57 percent also said the Internet should be managed and run not solely by governments, but by a partnership of technology companies, engineers, nongovernmental organizations and governments.

This so-called multi-stakeholder model is supported by the U.S., which has partnered with other International Telecommunications Union members to ensure individual governments like China and Russia do not gain the U.N.'s blessing to pass broad laws governing their countries’ networks at the expense of Internet freedom.