Research has revealed that a majority of Britons distrust brands when it comes to their data privacy. Attest, a leading consumer research platform, has found that 66% of UK consumers are concerned about data privacy when interacting with brands online.
Of those surveyed, 55-64-year-olds showed the highest concentration of worry about their data privacy (at 74%), yet even digital natives aged 18-24 (59%) stated their unease with how their information is gathered by brands online.
Eight in ten (76%) consumers opt out of being added to a company’s mailing list at least some of the time, while 41% say they do it habitually (opting out “always” or “most of the time”). Beyond mailing lists, the data shows that more than a third of consumers (35%) habitually reject non-essential website cookies, while a total of 63% deny them at least some of the time. Consumers who decline cookies are most likely to do so because they don’t trust the website with their data (46%). Meanwhile, nearly a third (31%) do it because they don’t want to be targeted with advertising.
However, The Zero-Party Data Revolution report also examined attitudes toward zero-party data, whereby consumers actively and willingly share their data to help brands shape products and services, as opposed to it being collected passively via cookies.
50% stated they would be more likely to “trust” those brands who collected zero-party data. Consumers would be more at ease using a brand’s website (60%) as well as interacting on social media (56%) if zero-party collection was used. With such increased trust created, 46% would be willing to subscribe to a brand’s mailing list.
Given that zero-party data involves explicitly asking consumers for information, this is done through interactive data collection methods. Attest sought to uncover which methods consumers preferred the most.
48% of respondents said interactive surveys are their preferred way for a brand to capture data about them, followed by loyalty cards (i.e. purchase history), while 37% like online forms. Cookies and social media monitoring were at the bottom of preferences.Consumer surveys are the most popular data collection method across all age groups; 49% of consumers aged 18-24 say they prefer them, as do 50.5% of those aged 55-64.
The Zero-Party Data Revolution report surveyed 1,885 nationally representative UK consumers and the research coincides with the sunsetting of third-party cookies on Google Chrome this year, marking one of the biggest shifts in digital advertising since the invention of the cookie back in 1992.
