The "dark side" of information technology: a survey of IT-related complaints from citizens

Although it is widely accepted that citizens benefit or may benefit from the applications of information technology, there are also complaints about these applications. This paper is devoted to the complaints of citizens that pertain to the applications of information technology itself, or about facts in which this technology is playing a significant role. We have analyzed a number of governmental databases in the Netherlands that contains complaints of citizens. We have investigated which proportion of the complaints could be related to information technology. For two governmental databases, we were able to make a reliably estimation of the proportion of information technology related complaints. We found that these proportions are 34% and 40% respectively. For one of the databases, a categorization according to the time dimension revealed that in 2001, the proportion of information technology related complaints is the highest namely 46%. This peak could have been caused by the crash of the dot.com bubble in the spring of 2001. This kind of information is necessary to gain a comprehensive understanding of the changing government-citizens relationship due to information technology.

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