Dive Brief:

• Older consumers are avoiding online auction, banking, social media, and other websites due to privacy concerns, according to a study by market research firm GfK.

• Almost 80% of those tracked by the study said marketers and advertisers are the least trustworthy. Americans baby-boomer age and older hold the most distrust, while younger Americans are less concerned about data privacy, the research found.

• The survey looked at the attitudes of more than 1,000 Americans over age 18 from March 7 to 9 this year. Less than 40% trust marketers and advertisers and social networks with personal data, while more than 68% trust hospitals and health care providers, online payments, and e-retailers.

Dive Insight:

There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to which entities Americans trust with their data, and which they don’t. Why do hospitals and health care providers rank so high while advertisers don’t? And why are marketers less trusted than the retailers who hire them? No surprise that GfK also found that news of the Heartbleed bug has made Americans even more cautious. In any case, the most interesting nugget here may be that while Americans don’t trust the government with their data all that much, they do want the government to devise stricter regulations to protect it.