A new report by ObserveIT’s highlights the poor state of employee awareness of data protection regulations in the US. While 59% of survey respondents from the US and the UK deal with sensitive data on a daily basis, a majority of US employees (53%) said they were not familiar with federal or state legislation on customer data protection. Moreover, 84% of respondents did not know about the existence of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and 90% had never heard of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Awareness was far higher in the UK, with 83% of employees citing awareness of company efforts to comply with GDPR. The study also found that data protection training is more common in the UK than in the US, which helps to explain the different levels of awareness. In the US, less than half (46%) of employees indicated that they had been adequately trained to protect customer data in a way that meets compliance standards. In the UK, this was true for two out of three employees (67%).
Read more: 84% of US employees have never heard of GDPR
