TrustArc: Global Privacy Benchmarks Survey

The July 1 deadline for complying with CCPA is rapidly approaching and there has been much speculation on whether companies will be ready by that date. To determine the answer to that question, TrustArc, a data privacy management company, conducted one of the most comprehensive global data privacy surveys of over 1,500 people. The results indicate that there is a large discrepancy between the importance companies are placing on data privacy and the actions they are taking to ensure they are protecting their employees and customers’ data privacy and complying with privacy regulations.

Highlights of the survey findings include:

A mere 14 percent of respondents have completed their work complying with CCPA, while a staggering 38 percent are either just starting planning or have not yet done anything.
79 percent of respondents believe that new technologies have caused them to rethink their approaches to privacy. Videoconferencing (73 percent) and collaboration tools (70 percent), two solutions that have exploded during the work-from-home orders, lead the list of technologies that required companies to rethink their privacy approaches.
While 44 percent of respondents expect a decrease or steep decrease in their company’s revenues due to COVID-19 and the global recession, only 15 percent expect there to be a corresponding decrease in their privacy spending, indicating privacy is a high priority in corporate budgets. Almost half (45 percent) strongly agree that “privacy is of great importance in their company and “permeates every decision taken.”
Despite these claims for how important privacy is to organizations and its employees, 50 percent of the respondents said their companies are using spreadsheets, open-source/free software or nothing at all to manage their privacy; a mere 19 percent have implemented privacy management software.
There is a clear disconnect between senior management’s perceptions of employee confidence in their company’s ability to keep employees and customers’ data secure and protected versus rank-and -file employees: 83 percent of senior management believes that employees have a great deal or complete confidence in their company versus only 68 percent of employees expressing the same sentiment.