London—Dentons and Privacy Culture Ltd have collaborated on the launch of the Global Privacy Culture Survey Report 2022.

In only its second year, almost 10000 employees operating across different organisations, countries, and sectors took part in the survey using Privacy Culture’s Horizon data insights platform to understand employee attitudes, knowledge and behaviour towards privacy and data protection.

The 2022 Global Privacy Culture Survey report provides crucial insights into how Privacy is evolving. Annual survey results will be published over a 10-year period, to allow the tracking of attitudes and patterns of behaviour over time. The report also includes thought leadership around topical corporate issues influencing an organisation’s privacy programme including Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Anticipatory Compliance.

The 10-minute anonymous Culture Horizon™ survey covers 12 themes including Governance & Accountability, Retention & Deletion, Risk Management including Privacy by Design, Data Security, and Data incident reporting, focusing on questions relevant to GDPR, and other global privacy standards and laws from around the world.

Respondents completed 50 questions using the psychometric Likert scale, recording employee views from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Survey findings were then supplemented with conversational insights from individuals in different areas of the organisation to understand better why employees may not be behaving in the expected privacy-compliant way.

Participating organisations are provided with a comprehensive report that covers the best and worst performing themes, deep insights into specific issues at both function and country level, in addition to high-level recommendations around how to address them. Individual results are shown against an overall benchmark of all participating companies.

The top 3 performing themes from the 2022 survey across all industries were Compliance and Monitoring, Data Security, and Data Breach & Incident Management. Data Security has moved up to replace Governance and Accountability in the top 3. This is likely due to a heightened awareness around the importance of ‘working securely wherever you are’ promoted throughout the pandemic, and now that hybrid and flexible working are considered the norm and cyber-attack sophistication never ceases to increase, data security will remain high on the DPO and CISO risk agenda.

Worryingly, Data Subject Rights has made an entrance in the top 5 lowest performing themes this year. Nick Graham, Partner, Privacy & Cybersecurity at Dentons explains: ‘Data subject rights are linked to rising complaints and claims, as awareness of rights grows, driven by data breaches and other issues such as where data is exported via cookies or use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).  In some cases, the demand on data subject rights is ahead of current capability which may explain the need for better processes here. There could also be more enforcement against misleading third-party platforms that purport to help data subjects exercise their rights’.

The Global Privacy Culture Survey Report 2022 is unmissable reading for DPOs, CPOs, CISOs, CDOs and CIOs. To find out how to assess, measure, and embed a privacy culture across your organisation click here.

Click here to download your free copy.

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