Image adapted from Jon McGovern on Flickr.com (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonmcgovern/2673202881/)

Recently, I had the pleasure to be involved in a large survey regarding the treatment of privacy and data protection by international organizations. The opinion of a lot of consumers around the world was also taken into account in the survey, which resulted in an interesting mix of views and opinions. One of the most surprising outcomes of the survey to me was that particularly the well organized countries like the Netherlands, Belgium but also the US had a relatively high score with regards to having lost privacy sensitive data.

On average about 58% of organizations around the world admitted to having lost customer data. But in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and the US the percentage was above 70 which is surprisingly high if you take into account that many of these organizations say that privacy is important to them and that they feel that they have a good security regime to safeguard the protection of their critical data. About 80% of companies in these countries say that they feel that they have adequate security measures. So apparently there is a mismatch between intent and actions. Clearly, good intentions are not enough!

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