Landmark privacy employee research project unveiled on Data Privacy Day

The Global Privacy Culture Survey, developed by Privacy Culture, seeks to analyse the practices and sentiments of employees across a range of industries.

The initial psychometric survey report will feature anonymised responses from 5,000 employees at 10 international organisations operating in 50 different countries.

It is being launched alongside a subscription product called Culture Horizon that allows people to compare, sort and extract survey data relating to different functions, geography, location, jurisdiction and industry sectors.  The aim is to provide tools to enable organisations to identify skills and training gaps.

Steve Wright, Chief Executive Officer at Privacy Culture, said: “As organisations become lean, agile and responsive to economic and pandemic demands organisations must evaluate why data privacy is struggling to land within their organisation.

“They must ensure that the levels of data privacy training and awareness are fit for purpose for all staff and especially in those roles that are involved with data processing activities.

“More importantly, they need to know what can be done to identify privacy risks, reduce the likelihood of them materialising, and how to embed and operationalise privacy within core business  functions. That is why we are launching the Global Privacy Culture Survey.”

The survey covers 12 domains including accountability, retention, security, data transfers and breach management with questions relevant to GDPR, and other global privacy standards and laws from around the world.

Respondents complete 50 questions using the psychometric Likert scale, that records people’s views from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Survey findings are supplemented with interview-based conversations with individuals in order to  “highlight key insights into why employees may not be behaving in the expected  privacy-compliant way.

Headline reports are likely to be published annually for 10 years, to allow the tracking of attitudes and patterns of behaviour over time, with the first report published around Easter time. The report was developed by Privacy Culture with consulting firm Capgemini, giant law firm Dentons, data visualisation provider Kicktag and Queen Mary University of London.

Key findings will be revealed exclusively at the PrivSec Global virtual conference on 23-25 March.

To find out more about the survey and the Culture Horizon subscription product click here.

See below for a video announcement about the Global Privacy Culture Survey and Culture Horizon, from Steve Wright.