Why Is Consumer Digital Trust Eroding?
There’s no doubt that shoppers are looking more skeptically at the retailers they patronize. In some ways, that was probably inevitable, given the evolving ways that brands engage with consumers, says Wyatt Meek, global retail industry director for Cisco.
“Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed an explosion of new business models that derived value in some capacity through the harvesting of consumer information,” Meek explains. “The problem is that a majority of consumers didn’t realize just how much data was being collected and how they were being monetized. As these business models were exposed through the media, consumers’ concerns went up and digital trust went down.”
That’s a function of some retailers’ failure to be as transparent as consumers expect them to be with how they collect and use personal data, Meek says. He adds, though, that even in cases where companies have a reasonable privacy policy and outstanding internal controls over data, “this ultimately won’t matter if a hacker gets their hands on the data.”
In other words, to mitigate the growing distrust of consumers, retailers must address both privacy and cybersecurity: That is, they must be transparent and fair about the way they collect and use data, and must also deploy the necessary security controls and policies that reduce the risk of accidental or malicious exposure.
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