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Vendor says it has never been easier to lose loyalty and miss out on the opportunity to meaningfully engage with customers.
Consumers are growing more wary of trusting mobile operators and brands with their personal data, heaping more pressure on industry players to be responsible custodians of private information.
This is according to Syniverse, which surveyed 8,000 18-44 year-olds spread across eight countries, and found that 50% of them trust mobile operators and brands less today than they did three years ago. 71% of the respondents said they don’t trust mobile operators to take care of their data.
Furthermore, 55% believe brands are responsible for safeguarding their personal data, while 30% hold their mobile operator responsible. Only 15% said it is up to regulators to protect their information.
"There has never been a greater opportunity to lose loyalty," said Mary Clark, chief marketing officer of Syniverse.
She told Total Telecom at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday that data security, transparency, and control are three of the major concerns that consumers have when it comes to sharing personal information.
What’s more, the next generation is just as reticent about sharing personal information.
"If anything, there is potentially more scepticism among millennials," Clark said.
However, there is an upside, according to Syniverse, which is that 38% of the respondents said that if they share their data, they expect to receive something in return.
"That says to me that there’s demand," Clark said.
"There is an opportunity to leverage personal data to create a meaningful interaction that’s timely, that’s relevant," provided those in the mobile marketing ecosystem strive to build trust and understanding with the consumer, and work diligently to continuously improve the effectiveness of campaigns, she said.
The stakes are high though, due in no small part to the advent of online ad blockers.
3UK and 3 Italia last week revealed plans to deploy network-level ad blocking to give customers more control over their privacy and data usage.
Mobile operators can take this kind of action because "they’re not part of the ad-revenue stream, it doesn’t necessarily hurt them," Clark said.
"We don’t have a lot of time to fix this," Clark warned. "We really do face a chance of derailing this opportunity to improve our daily lives."
