The survey – consisting of 9200 interviews conducted in 14 countries – aimed to clarify consumer attitudes towards the use of the data that constitutes an individual’s digital self. This is made up of the sum of a consumer’s digital “fingerprints”, the fragmented personal and behavioral data left behind every time they interact with a service through their service provider such as browsing a website using their mobile phone, as well as personal profile information, including their experiences, needs and behaviors, that reside within business and customer relationship management systems.
The results of the survey show considerable concern among consumers about the use of digital self data, with 82 percent of respondents seeing privacy as an important topic, 76 percent being concerned about privacy violations, and 45 percent feeling they lack control over their personal data.
However, 69 percent of respondents said they were interested in using a single portal to manage and supervise the various permissions they had provided to different parties to access their personal data. The survey also found that CSPs were among the most trusted organizations regarding an individual’s privacy and data security. In fact, CSPs ranked ahead of insurance companies, online portals, loyalty card providers, governments and online shops and communities in the minds of end-users.
“Telecoms companies have long-standing relationships with their customers. They are bound by service level agreements and billing relationships, and have deep customer insight,” said Paul Magelli, head of Subscriber Data Management, Nokia Siemens Networks. “The results of this global survey demonstrate that CSPs are suited, and more importantly trusted, to help make the fragmented personal data of an individual – their digital self – more tangible and easier to manage.”
Based on the survey results, respondents fall into three groups: The ‘Afraid’ seek to protect their digital self by minimizing the disclosure of this information; the ‘Selective’ are pragmatic and generally more willing to embrace privacy risks in return for added value; and the ‘Uninvolved’ tend to be younger, less likely to own a credit card and lack awareness of privacy issues. There were significant variations as to the proportion of each group within regional samples, with countries such as Germany, Australia and Canada generally having the highest proportion of the ‘Afraid’ (49-44 percent), and China and Taiwan having the least (23-24 percent).
In Brazil, the survey revealed a number of variations to the overall global results. A majority – 53 percent – of Brazilian participants were found to be in the advanced ‘Selective’ group, only Egypt, China and Taiwan had a higher proportion. This may explain the dramatically higher levels* of comfort when the personal data to be disclosed was less detailed such as: general whereabouts as opposed to exact location; general age group versus exact date of birth; and income level versus monthly income. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest in a portal to manage all their permissions was thus significantly higher than the global average, with 80 percent of Brazilians describing this approach as something they would be interested in.
The Nokia Siemens Networks privacy study was carried out in September 2009 and aimed to understand the attitudes, motives, perceptions and behaviors of end users towards privacy; their readiness to allow the usage of their digital self data by CSPs and third parties; and their willingness to share that data in the context of the value they could derive from doing so.