Car buyers and mobility app users around the world are aware about issues involving data privacy and increasingly willing to share personal info for certain applications, according to a new survey.
The survey by McKinsey & Company of more than 3,000 consumers across the U.S., China and Germany revealed that 90% know certain data (such as their current location, address-book details and browser history) are openly accessible to applications and shared with third parties.
Asked whether they consciously decided to grant certain applications access to their personal data, 79% said yes, even if they may have generally disabled that access for other applications.
McKinsey & Company"In each case, American consumers proved somewhat more guarded than their Chinese or German counterparts, but even at the low end, 85% of the U.S. respondents answered in the affirmative to the first question, and 73% answered yes to the second," McKinsey & Company's survey report stated.
American consumers were also more guarded than those surveyed in Germany or China when it came to sharing personal data for auto-related apps. But a majority of respondents in each country were on board -- as long as the use case met the consumer's needs.
For example, 70% of Americans were willing to share their personal data for connected navigation services (the most popular app among those surveyed), while 90% of Chinese respondents would share personal data to enable predictive maintenance (the most popular use-case option in that country).
Those surveyed also indicated they were willing to pay for numerous data-enabled features. In Germany, for example, 73% indicated they would pay for networked parking services, and in China 78% would pay for predictive maintenance rather than choose free, ad-supported versions of those options.
Seventy-three percent of Americans surveyed said they would pay for usage-monitoring services, 72% for networked parking and 71% for predictive maintenance instead of selecting free ad-supported versions.
"Although the game is still early, these expressions of consumer cooperation — in the auto industry, at least — suggest that concerns about data-sharing can be satisfied when the value proposition is apparent," the report stated.
