People fear losing privacy

The respondents in most of the countries agreed that the control of their privacy is more important than potential advantages of sharing personal details.

Shopping online, illustrative stock photo.Shopping online, illustrative stock photo. (Source: Tomáš Benedikovič)

More than half of consumers do not shop online due to their fear of losing privacy, while only less than 10 percent say they control the processing of their personal data. Meanwhile, six out of 10 people do not read or only quickly read through the privacy policy when entering a certain website.

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This stems from a survey carried out by consulting company KPMG International on 6,900 consumers from 24 countries across the globe between April and May 2016, the TASR newswire reported.

The respondents in most of the countries agreed that the control of their privacy is more important than potential advantages of sharing personal details.

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The survey suggests that eight out of 10 consumers would disagree with the sale of personal details to third parties in exchange for swiftness, comfort, broader offer of products, home delivery and better prices when shopping online.

“The understanding of exchange value between the access to personal details and trust has never been more important than today,” Peter Borák of KPMG branch in Slovakia said, as quoted by TASR.

More than half of the respondents claimed they are willing to share the information about their gender, education or ethnicity. On the other hand, only 16 percent claimed they would share information about current locality, while 14 percent would share information about their address and 13 percent about their medical records.

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Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of respondents do not feel good about their personal data being used by smartphone and tablet applications.

The consumers sharing their personal details are mostly afraid of unwanted marketing, the sale of personal data to third parties and insufficiently secured systems when shopping online. One-third of respondents consider well-secured computer systems the most effective tool to get customers to share their personal details with organisations, TASR reported.

The survey also suggests consumers care about online security more. Half of the respondents have erased cookies from their internet browsers and manage the settings of their social networks. Nearly one-third of consumers use incognito mode when searching the internet, while one-quarter encrypts their data.

Despite greater caution regarding the personal details, up to 57 percent of respondents do not read or only quickly scan the private policy rules.

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