Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences
School of Management Sciences
Department of Marketing and Communication Management
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Members of the public are finding themselves increasingly bombarded by invasive advertising and soliciting. In South Africa, privacy concerns are becoming an issue among consumers – especially in the light of recent hackings into financial institutions’ Internet banking services, which has led to the theft of customers’ account and password details.
In another instance, an employee accidentally e-mailed the company’s customer database, which included private e-mail and residential addresses of high-profile South Africans, to subscribers.
The truth is that every business transaction can invade your personal privacy: from your student records to the books you borrow, from your vehicle registration to the kind of car insurance you have, from the Internet sites you visit to the competitions you enter.
The focus of this research project entitled: WHAT’S IN A NAME? How private is your personal information? is on consumer information privacy concerns in a commercial environment.
National consumer information privacy surveys have been conducted in both South Africa and Australia. The research will be extended to Brazil and Croatia in the near future.
Findings indicate that:
· Contrary to common belief, the South African public do not differ from Americans or Australians in their views of, and approach to information privacy. Findings show that information privacy is a salient and relevant issue to many people, and this supports the conclusion of international studies that consumers world-wide are concerned about threats to their personal privacy;
· Four privacy concern dimensions exist, including:
· privacy protection – South African consumers indicated that companies should have privacy protection policies in place covering issues such as how personal information will be shared with third parties, the reasons why information need to be collected from consumers and how information is kept safe by companies. The response from Australian respondents were in line with their South African counterparts;
· information misuse – local consumers believe that companies regularly share personal information with other companies without their permission. They also believe that companies often misuse their personal information. The majority of Australian respondents stated that they would refuse to provide any information if no reason is provided by the company on why they are collecting the information and that they would insist that their details be removed if they felt it was being misused;
· solicitation - privacy often relates to the right to be left alone, and to be free from intrusion or interruption. One of the privacy concerns of South African individuals seem to be media intrusiveness because consumers have little or no control over the prospecting efforts of companies. It bothers most that they receive so much unrequested advertising material that is of no interest to them. In contrast, less than half of the Australians respondents had a problem with this type of solicitation - probably because they have legislation in place that prohibits the sending of unsolicited commercial electronic messages; and
· government protection. Consumers have indicated that: government should limit companies’ use of personal information to only that purpose for which it was collected; government should do more to protect the safety of personal information; and that government should restrict companies to collecting only the information needed for a specific transaction. Again the Australians differed in their responses – they felt that the responsibility is on the side of companies rather than government.
Prof Yolanda Jordaan
+ 27 (0) 12 420 2997
Marketing and Communication Management
yolanda.jordaan@up.ac.za
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