How To Build Trust Through Privacy

Is there any clearer sign of trust than sharing a secret? When you disclose private information to a friend or a family member, you’re assuming it will remain between the two of you. And if you discover that this agreement has been violated, you rightly wonder if your trust in that person was misplaced.

Your customers have the same expectation; trust is vital to them, and one of the best ways to earn it is by keeping their personal information private. This doesn’t just mean having a robust and secure data management platform — it means you have to communicate your privacy policies in simple language customers can understand, give them control over their information and do everything possible to keep that information safe.

Today, we have advanced data encryption, multifactor authentication and seemingly impenetrable security mechanisms everywhere you look — my own company works with this technology — and yet, we feel more exposed than ever. This is why consumers are becoming more jaded when it comes to providing their information for companies to use for any purpose. They want to be treated like partners whose information is well-protected and being put to good use.

Make clear communication a top priority.

When your customers want to learn about your privacy policies, they shouldn’t have to wade through a swamp of legalese and inscrutable technical language. There’s a reason why more than two-thirds of consumers report that they struggle to understand companies’ privacy policies – they’re often buried somewhere in the “terms and conditions” section of the website and impossible to understand even when customers unearth them.

Recent data privacy and security laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) include disclosure and reporting requirements, but regulators can’t write your policies or decide how to communicate with your customers for you. And why would you want them to? Your customers don’t want to read something that looks like it was written by a compliance robot — they want to know they’re trusting human beings with their personal information.

For example, instead of saying something like, “Pursuant to Clause 4, Subsection 3.1, your data will not be made available to third party entities,” just say, “We won’t share your data with anyone.” Your customers also shouldn’t have to wander around your website to find information like this — it should be easy to find on the homepage and direct visitors to a concise summary of the most salient points in your data policy. If you want to see privacy pages that check all these boxes, it’s tough to do better than Apple and Disney.

Your customers deserve to know exactly what you’re doing with their information, which is why reading your policies and principles shouldn’t be like deciphering a top-secret code.

Give customers control over their data...

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