Millennials trust Amazon and PayPal over banks when it comes to personal data

By Oscar Williams-Grut

Young people in Britain are more trusting of tech giants such as Amazon and PayPal than they are of banks when it comes to personal data, according to a new survey.

A survey of 2,000 people across the UK by business intelligence group RFI found that most 18-to-24-year-olds put Amazon and PayPal above banks when asked to rank a number of organisations by how much they trust them to “hold and maintain the privacy and security of your personal information.”

MasterCard and Visa also ranked above banks, although below Amazon and PayPal. The name of the banks asked about were not made public.

The findings come in the wake of serious IT problems at TSB, one of the UK’s major banks. Some customers were left unable to access their accounts for weeks and several reported being given access to other people’s accounts when they did manage to gain access.

77 per cent of the UK public said they did not trust Facebook to hold their data, RFI’s survey found. The survey was conducted in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that highlighted the amount of data Facebook collects on users and how advertisers use the platform.