Concerns over privacy hit record high, says new survey. Even business interests alarmed

excerpt via Exchangewire:    Privacy awareness body Truste has today (28 January) released its annual Consumer Confidence Index, revealing 60% of participants in the survey were more concerned about their online privacy compared to 12 months ago, with 89% actively “avoiding” companies they don’t believe protect their privacy adequately....However, it seems that contagion has spread to the private sector too, as there are three times as many survey participants concerned about companies sharing their personal information with other companies (60%), than governments’ monitoring activity (20%)....Ken Parnham, Truste managing director, Europe, commenting that the online advertising sector can only suffer over such widespread negative public sentiment.He says: “After a barrage of media headlines about government surveillance programmes such as NSA’s PRISM, it is perhaps unsurprising that consumer online trust has fallen to its lowest point yet, with only 55% of internet users prepared to trust companies with personal data online.

“It is a wake-up call for businesses that commercial data collection and sharing, rather than government activity, is the main driver of increased online privacy concerns.”

In fact the use of personal data for the purposes of targeting online advertising ranked as the second-biggest concern among the survey participants, with 54% of respondents reporting it as a major concern, while 19% were concerned about companies tracking their location on a smartphone.