Theme
Spurred by news stories and the May 2018 deadline for compliance with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), interest in data privacy reached a new peak this spring. As of 20 May 2018, search interest in the terms ’What is GDPR’ and ’data privacy’ were respectively fifty and ten times greater than six months prior.1
Awareness that personal data is being used and shared online also increased this year. According to Deloitte’s research, 82 per cent of respondents with smartphones believed that companies they interact with online use their personal data ‘most’ or ‘all’ of the time. This was four percentage points higher than in 2017. Three-quarters believed that these data were being shared with third parties, five percentage points higher than the prior year.
The majority of respondents (adults aged 16-75) were concerned about how their data is being used. When asked, in June-July this year, shortly after the deadline for GDPR compliance, whether they were worried about how companies use their personal data, share it, or store it, the vast majority were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ concerned (see Figure 3). Over half of all respondents (55 per cent) were ‘very’ concerned about how companies shared their personal data with third parties.
Being concerned is one matter; changing behaviour is another. And it is likely that people will remain worried about how their data is used, while continuing to use a whole range of services that share their data. This is not just the data that a user has submitted to the site, but also data sourced from other online destinations. Some users may even be encouraged to share their friends’ personal data in exchange for a modest incentive.2