Today, the German market watchdog of the digital world of the Consumer Association Brandenburg presented its results of a recent study on "E-Payment – How secure are our data when paying online?“. Although electronic payment methods are becoming increasingly popular, consumers continue to worry about the handling of their personal data. For this study, the market experts conducted an online survey together with the institute forsa in July 2017. The sample consisted of 2,001 users of electronic payment methods from the age of 18 years on.
These are the key findings:
- Consumers do not want to spend more than five minutes reading privacy statements from an electronic payment service provider. In practice, however, consumers need 24 minutes to read the privacy policy of PayPal or 16 minutes for Amazon Pay’s privacy policy, respectively.
- Generally, a large amount of personal data is collected. Depending on the payment service provider, between four and 13 individual data points are collected during the registration or payment process. In addition, providers use different numbers of tracking services to collect personally identifiable information such as user or consumer behavior – before as well as after login.
- Eight out of ten consumers say that they want to be informed about the handling of their personal data. Following the test purchases, the market watchdog team asserted the right to obtain information from the inspected providers (Amazon Pay, giropay, paydirekt, PayPal, Skrill and SOFORT Überweisung) and requested respective information letters. The response time varied between two and 62 days. Sometimes a fee for the information was required or it had to be asked several times to obtain the desired information.
Source: Watchdog of the digital world
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