You might have a customer looking at your signup form, deciding whether to enter a real email address, or a throwaway one. That small hesitation is what a trust gap looks like in practice. It doesn’t always show up in your metrics, but it shapes every relationship you are trying to build.
According to a Qualtrics report, only 39% of consumers believe organizations use their personal information responsibly. This data was drawn from 20,000 people across 14 countries.
You might have strengthened your data security program with encryption, monitoring, audits, and vendor reviews. However, your customers have no idea any your data security investments exists. That is a visibility problem, and you can easily fix it.
Key Takeaways
- Consumers hesitate to share their data due to a trust gap, as many feel companies misuse personal information.
- To build trust, organizations must prioritize transparency, visibility, and control over data security practices.
- Implementing zero-trust architecture helps address consumer fears by minimizing unauthorized access and ensuring ongoing permissions reassessment.
- Companies can demonstrate security maturity by mapping sensitive data, tightening access management, and reporting continuously on security efforts.
- Platforms like Onspring enhance trust by integrating risk and compliance data, making security efforts visible to consumers.
Table of Contents
Why Don’t Consumers Trust Companies With Their Data?
When interacting with a company, consumers are most concerned about data security. They see news about breaches every few weeks and wonder where their sensitive information goes after they hand it over.
Four forces that drive this confusion include:
- Breach fatigue. Major data breaches have become routine news, with around 94 million data records being leaked in the second quarter of 2025. People now assume every company is one bad day away from the same outcome.
- Opaque AI use. Personalization feels helpful right up until someone wonders what fed the AI algorithm and how their data security is protected.
- No visible control. Most consumers can’t easily see, correct, or delete what a company holds about them or understand about your data security safegaurds.
- Fraud fears. Qualtrics found fraud (33%) and hacking (23%) at the top of the worry list.
In the same study, nearly two-thirds of consumers say they worry about the safety of their personal details. Cyber threats are real, and your customers know it. What they do not know is what you are doing about them.
What Consumers Say Would Change Their Minds
Qualtrics also reported that 46% of consumers would share more information if companies were transparent about what gets collected, and 45% would share more if they could control or delete their own records.
Now, as a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professional, read those two findings from the compliance lens. Neither one asks you to buy new technology or rebuild your architecture. Both ask you to surface work your teams are already doing.
This means you have to be transparent about customer data during reporting. Giving people control is part of the workflow, and protecting sensitive information through transparent data security practices is already your day job.
How Data Security Turns Skeptics Into Customers
“Never trust, always verify” is the core idea behind zero-trust architecture. Every user, device, and request gets checked every time, regardless of where it originates.
Traditional perimeter security assumed anyone inside the network belonged there. That assumption falls apart when it comes to remote work, contractors and third-party integrations. It also does nothing about insider threats.
Zero-trust works in three ways that map directly to what consumers fear:
- People access only what their role requires, so unauthorized access to a single account does not expose the entire vault.
- Permissions get reassessed continuously rather than granted once and forgotten.
- When something does go wrong, the blast radius stays small and recoverable.
Strong data security is the mechanism behind every trust claim you make. Data protection is the promise you make to customers, and zero trust is how you keep it.
6 Ways To Demonstrate Security Maturity
To prove the maturity of your data security program, you need to make your controls legible to people outside your security team. Here is where to start:
1. Map Where Your Sensitive Data Lives
You cannot protect what you cannot find. Start with a complete inventory of every system, application, and third party that touches personal information, then classify what you find by risk level.
A living data map tells you precisely which systems hold sensitive data and who can reach it. It also serves as the foundation for everything else on this list, from breach response to the timely fulfillment of consumer rights requests.
2. Tighten Access Management With Least Privilege
Ask yourself one question: if an employee left today, how long would their credentials stay active?
Most access management failures come from accumulation rather than malice– and . For instance, an employee changes their role and collects new permissions without losing the old ones.
Role-based access control fixes this by tying permissions to job functions instead of individuals. When someone moves teams, their access automatically follows them. Make sure to review the access quarterly at a minimum and document every review.
3. Publish Your Data Privacy Commitments in Plain English
Your privacy notice was probably written by lawyers for lawyers. That is understandable, and it is also why almost nobody finishes reading it.
Write a second version for humans. Explain what you collect, why you collect it, how long you keep it, and exactly who you share it with.
Then make the control real. Give people a working way to view, export, and delete their records and answer those requests on a timeline you publish openly. Clear data privacy communication is the highest-return trust move available to you.
4. Test Your Backup and Recovery Plans on a Schedule
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. Treat data security backup and recovery as two separate disciplines. Copying data is straightforward, but restoring it inside a window your customers can tolerate is the difficult part.
Run recovery tests on a fixed schedule and record what happened:
- How long did the restore take?
- What broke along the way?
- What did you fix afterward?
Resilience is a trust signal. Customers forgive an outage far more readily than they forgive a week of downtime with no explanation.
5. Extend Your Controls to the Cloud and Your Vendors
Your customers do not distinguish between your system and the vendor’s. A breach at your payment processor counts as your breach in the eyes of the public and, increasingly, of regulators.
Cloud security depends on knowing exactly where a provider’s responsibility ends and yours begins. Know which controls belong to your provider and which belong to you, then verify both.
For third parties, build a tiered review process:
- Critical vendors receive annual assessments, with security requirements written into contracts.
- Moderate-risk vendors get lighter reviews on a set cadence.
- Every vendor gets documented, so nobody slips through an unmonitored gap.
6. Report on Security Continuously
Annual reports describe a version of your organization that no longer exists months before anyone reads them. Continuous monitoring changes that conversation entirely. Instead of telling your board and your customers what was true last October, you show them what is true today.
Connect your security tools, so findings flow into one place instead of sitting in six dashboards nobody compares. Then, build reporting a non-technical executive can absorb in 90 seconds.
External certifications matter as well. Attestations like SOC 2 Type II and FedRAMP provide independent evidence that your data security claims hold up under scrutiny.
Why Strong Security Strategies Still Fail to Build Trust
Most organizations have a proof problem. In most departments, the evidence is distributed across spreadsheets and email threads. Compiling and assembling them takes weeks.
Privacy, risk, security, and compliance teams work in separate systems with separate definitions, so nothing reconciles cleanly. Reporting remains point-in-time, so it goes stale before it ever reaches leadership.
Many security strategies buckle under manual overhead. When proving your security posture takes an entire quarter, you eventually stop proving it at all. Modern security strategies demand integration and visibility across your entire risk management program.
Make Your Security Work Visible With Onspring
Trust gets earned when your controls are visible, not just documented.
Onspring connects risk, compliance, audit, vendor risk, and privacy in a single no-code platform. This way, evidence gathers itself while your teams work. The reports refresh on their own and requests move through workflows instead of inboxes.
That is part of why Onspring has held the top position in Info-Tech Research Group’s GRC Leader Quadrant for five years running. Your customers are waiting for a reason to believe you. Strong and visible data security is the reason.
Download the ebook Understanding Zero-Trust Security and Its Impact on Your Organization to get the full framework.
