Nearly a year after the notorious hack of Equifax Inc. saw the theft of 146.6 million customer records, a new report has found that there’s a big gap between what consumers want in data protection and what businesses are providing.

The findings come today from CA Technologies Inc. and Frost and Sullivan’s The Global State of Online Digital Trust report. It based its findings on a global survey of consumers, cybersecurity professionals and business executives about their trust in the organizations that collect our digital data.

“We wanted to understand the differences in the perspectives of these very different audiences,” a spokesperson for CA Technologies said. “Do they hold the same view of the importance of digital trust? How is digital trust viewed differently around the world? With that information, we can build an evaluation index that can be measured over time to understand how the state of digital trust globally is evolving.”

Using the data gathered, the Digital Trust Index for 2018 obtained a score of 61 points out of 100. But within the assessments, there were strong differences between consumers and business.

Consumers were the most skeptical, with only 49 percent of respondents saying that they were now willing to provide their personal data in exchange for digital services, and 54 percent distrust organizations enough to believe that they will sell their personal data to other companies.

On the flip side, businesses themselves didn’t see it, with business decision-makers and cybersecurity professionals ranking trust at 75 percent overall. Some 90 percent claimed that they’re very good at protecting consumer data despite the rate of data breaches continuing to rise.

The report argues that consumer concern may be well-founded. A full 43 percent of business executives admitting to selling consumer data, including personally identifiable information despite 92 percent of business executives saying that they believe better data privacy is a point of differentiation for them against their competitors.

On security, most business leaders (81 percent) said that they believed that they have sufficient security measures in place, but only 60 percent of cybersecurity professionals feel that nonsecurity staff are trained to protect consumer data.

“Consumers are losing control of their data, whether they want to or not. Initiatives such as the E.U.’s GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] have grown out of an increasing distrust that businesses will be good stewards of the data they collect without strong oversight,” the reports authors note. “There is a lot of work to do to earn back consumer trust, but before we begin, we need to know where we started.”

Image: 4thglryofgod/Flickr