Who Do We Trust With Our Personal Data?

Once we had an idea of what our data was worth, the next question was who we trust with this data. At frog, this is not an academic question.  We are working with companies from many different industries who want to offer consumers some sort of service in exchange for information.   This is new territory for both consumers and companies.  Take the example of Home Automation and Home Energy Management Systems.  Here are systems which generate data on whether you play Xbox or watch TV; whether dinner is in the microwave or on the stove; and what time you typically come home (and when you don’t). In short, lots of personal data is produced by smart homes, HEM systems and sensor networks, and when this is combined with other sources such as web browsing history, purchase records, and social-graphs, the resulting consumer insight is deeper than anything we have seen before.  Incidentally, I will be presenting a webinar on this topic on Feb 3rd called “Smart Home Opportunity: Balancing Customer Data and Privacy.”

Of course, companies can build trust, but we wanted to get a sense of where Americans are today with their trust.  We selected some companies as representatives of industries and asked survey respondents how committed they felt those companies were to making sure their information is never used in a way that they would not like.  Companies were ranked along the following five categories:

Completely Trustworthy: You would freely volunteer sensitive personal information about yourself to this company because they can be trusted

Trustworthy: You would not mind providing them with sensitive information if asked in exchange for a service that you want to use

Untrustworthy: You would only provide them with sensitive information because they require you to provide this in exchange for letting you use a service that you absolutely need to use

Completely untrustworthy: You would never provide them with any sensitive information

Don’t know

The results surprised us.  First of all, the level of trust for business is pretty high across the board.  In a post-Enron, post financial melt-down world, we thought we would see greater distrust.  In fact, most businesses score very highly with our sample, which is reflective of the general US population.  This is a gift to the business community, as trust is hard to gain and easy to lose.  Interestingly, PR firm Edelman found a similar increase in general trust of business although the overall trust percentages are lower.

In terms of winners and losers, the financial institutions do very well.  Perhaps we are accustomed to sharing private information with them, but banks, credit card firms and online payment providers had top scores in terms of trustworthiness with personal data.  Web services and content firms also performed well.  They operate on the middle tier of personal data as described in our experiment.

Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit of make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information.  For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers. 

Image by Iker Ayesteran