Australians trust banking and finance, government and energy sectors with their private data, according to a recent survey released by Deloitte. Retail, media and social media came in last.
On Tuesday, Deloitte released its annual privacy index of the top 116 consumer brands in Australia throughout 13 sectors, but it didn't name the companies, Mashable reported.
The New York City-based firm surveyed 1,000 consumers and found that banking and finance was the most trusted industry out of the 13 assessed, while retail, media and social media were perceived as least trusted industries.
Tommy Viljoen, Deloitte's national lead partner of Cyber Risk Services, says there's a direct correlation between regulation and trust.
"Industries that are far less regulated tend to have lesser perception of trust," Vilijoenhen said.
Even though social media dropped eight places from 2015 when it came to trust ranking, Marta Ganko, risk advisory client manager at Deloitte and co-author of the report, told ZDNet that there is more transparency of data and privacy in social media.
"What we saw this year is from a consumer sentiment perspective, social media went down quite considerably," Ganko said. "I was quite surprised because when you do look at the practices and what the apps actually do or what they do on their websites, they actually do employ quite good practice because they do tell us everything about what they're doing, how they use cookies on their website. So there's that disconnect in terms of what consumers think because of the perception that is out there ... versus what is actually happening."
Consumers are now also more knowledgeable about how to protect their private data.
According to the report, 94 percent of consumers rate trust over ease of using a website, app or device. More than 21 percent of those consumers want to know if third parties are receiving their information, and 14 percent want to know how personal info is protected.
The top three kinds of information consumers were most worried about sharing include credit cards, ID numbers and medical records.
The Deloitte report showed 43 percent of privacy is still handled by a legal team, while 23 percent is managed by risk department, and 15 percent by compliance.
The reports also revealed over 84 percent of companies hired a privacy officer, and 73 percent of those roles is managing privacy full-time.
"Traditionally, privacy has always been a legal consideration for organizations, making sure it's compliant with the law. But what we're starting to see is that organizations are starting to take the next step towards best practice by making sure not only does the legal staff understand the organization's privacy obligation, but expanding it out to the rest of the organization as well," Ganko told ZDNet.
Deloitte also found that overall 81 percent of data from mobile devices went overseas, meaning the technology industry sent and received the most data in comparison to other sectors.
