Protiviti-Oxford survey shows ‘us vs. them’ disconnect in how global execs view data privacy

Trusting government to protect data

We asked all respondents about government-issued digital ID to gauge their level of trust in the government to safeguard important personal information. The comfort level with a government-issued digital ID was highest in North America with 65% saying they would be comfortable or extremely comfortable, while the numbers were significantly lower in Asia-Pacific (41%) and Europe (28%).

Meanwhile, more than half (56%) of business leaders overall said they were confident or extremely confident in the government's ability to put the proper regulation in place to protect personal online data.

The numbers were a bit higher in North America (69%) than they were in Europe (50%) or Asia-Pacific (48%). Age was a significant factor in this finding: 59% of executives over the age of 50 said they would be comfortable to extremely comfortable compared to just 32% of those under 50.

Top challenges to data privacy compliance

Finally, when we asked executives about their company's biggest challenges complying with privacy regulations, the top 3 challenges were:

• Maintaining an effective control environment amid emerging threats

• Identifying all internal systems that contain personal data

• Dealing with different and sometimes conflicting data privacy regimes

Regionally, in North America, the top challenge was "dealing with different and sometimes conflicting data privacy regimes." In Asia-Pacific, it was "maintaining an effective control environment among emerging threats." Interestingly, Europe's top challenge-"training staff in light of the quickly evolving landscape"-wasn't even among the top 3 challenges overall.

And when we asked them what aspect of their customer data gave them the most concern, the top three concerns overall were: how it's collected, how it's used and how it's stored. These concerns were ranked the same in Europe and Asia-Pacific but in North America, the top concern was how data is used, followed by how it's stored and how it's collected.