As new U.S. consumer privacy regulation passes state-to-state, this is creating confusion and uncertainty for small businesses as well as muddling the situation for consumers. One impact has been that online data privacy concerns, when consumers visit small business websites, is under further scrutiny.
By the end of 2023, residents of roughly a quarter of U.S. states will have some level of control over how companies collect and use their personal information, based on the new comprehensive consumer privacy laws.
The focus with consumer privacy is with the handling and protection of the sensitive personal information provided by customers in the course of everyday transactions to businesses of different types. These concerns extend not only to the business that collects the data and uses it for its own purposes but also where data is packaged and sold on to other organisations (almost always without consumer consent).
Not all of the regulations are equal within the U.S. (and collectively the legal requirements differ to the rules within other countries). In the U.S., a variety of social, legal and political issues arise across states.
A new privacy survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults by HostingAdvice.com reports that more than half of those surveyed (53 percent) said their biggest privacy concern when visiting a small business website is that their personal data may get stolen or sold to a third party.
Other worries include:
- 49 percent: Sites want Too Much Information.
- 39 percent: Sites Have No Encryption/HTTPS.
- 33 percent: Visitors can Get Adware (unsolicited popup ads).
- 26 percent: Visitors have No Anonymity.
The survey also found that the most important factor when consumers choose a good web hosting service are price (51 percent) and security/privacy features (47 percent). Other factors include customer support (45 percent) and in-house servers, which are not managed by a third party (42 percent).
For businesses, the survey shows that Google Cloud and GoDaddy are the most popular web hosting providers, followed by Shopify, AWS Host Server, Bluehost, HostGator, Liquid Web and IONOS. For those that use, or have used, web hosting services, the most popular kind they normally look for is a free one (43 percent) or cloud hosting (40 percent).
This was based on a national online survey of 1,055 US consumers, ages 18 and over, was conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of HostingAdvice in June of 2023. The survey responses were designed to be nationally representative of the U.S. population for age, gender, region, and ethnicity.
