American Express, eBay and IBM are the most trusted brands in the USA

According to annual rankings from Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe reported in the study that polled 6,486 adult-aged US consumers the title of the top-three most trusted companies for privacy in 2008 was granted to American Express, eBay and IBM. In the course of the research consumers were asked which companies they thought were most trustworthy and which did the best job safeguarding personal information. A total of 706 companies were named by consumers, and 211 made the final list of most trusted companies. Along with the ratings the survey also showed consumers’ concerns about the issues related to the privacy and identity theft.

This year AmEx retained its top position in the fifth-annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy list with eBay, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Nationwide and Charles Schwab keeping their top 10 rankings as well. The financial sector seems to be less successful in protecting privacy in comparison with the technology industry that showed much improvement during 2008 with eBay, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and HP all bettered previous rankings. Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Verizon and FedEx all made into the top 20 for the first time while Google, which rounded out 2007’s top 10, did not even crack the top 20 this year.

The survey noted to the gap between the importance that privacy means for the customers and their inability to proper control their personal data. 73% of consumers said that the protection of their sensitive information is important or very important to them against 69% in the previous year. Meantime, only 45% of them confessed that they have control over their private data which is a decrease from 56% in 2006. In addition, about 62% of consumers consider identity theft to be a key factor that serves as an index of a company’s privacy while 53% named data breach notification and 42% cited annoying background chatter in a public venue. Only 18% of consumers cited social networking abuse as a factor.