The State of Digital Trust – A snapshot of Australians’ trust in an increasingly digital society

Introduction: trust begins with feeling secure

The events of 2020 have exposed just how critical trust is for consumers and businesses alike. Organisations had to trust their employees to work from home, and consumers had to trust businesses with their information. As a society, we had to trust each other to make the right decisions around health and safety, trust the scientific community to create life-saving vaccines, and trust the government to support us during a time of global economic uncertainty and political upheaval.

All this comes amidst a backdrop of rising security concerns, highlighted by the Australian Federal Government releasing a new Cyber Security Strategy, announcing Australia’s largest ever investment in cyber security and giving clear warnings of the increased risk of cyber attacks. 2020 also saw a number of Australian organisations impacted by malicious cyber attacks, along with rising data breach volumes and cyber-threat activity, opportunistic social engineering scams, rigorous regulatory enforcement of data protection legislation, and soaring privacy expectations among consumers.

At Okta, we wanted to know what trust looks like in this increasingly digital world, so we worked with YouGov to survey more than 1,000 Australian workers and 15,000 office workers in total around the world (US, UK, Netherlands, Italy, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Japan, and Spain). We set out to see how much we trust when we only engage online, if brands have done enough in the eyes of consumers to build trust, and what factors impact the way we interact with digital services.

We found that when it comes to building trust in Australia, consumers care most about the core competencies: service reliability, strong security, and good data handling practices. Survey respondents also made it clear that trust in their digital world directly impacts purchase decisions, and many will cut ties with brands they lose trust in.