70% of US consumers say they worry about data privacy and security, up from 60% a year earlier, according to Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, which polled 3,524 US adults in the second quarter of 2025. That is the sixth year Deloitte has run the survey, and 2025 marks the sharpest jump in stated privacy anxiety since the study began tracking it.
Worry alone does not tell the whole story. The same survey found consumers growing more skeptical that sharing their data is even worth it, less trusting of the companies that hold it, and increasingly anxious about how generative AI tools handle personal information behind the scenes.
How many US consumers worry about data privacy in 2026?
70% of US consumers worried about data privacy and security in Deloitte's Q2 2025 survey, compared with 60% in the 2024 edition of the same annual study. That ten-point jump came alongside a rise in lived experience: 58% of respondents said they encountered at least one scam attempt in the past year, and 47% experienced at least one digital security failure of some kind.
Worry has been trending upward for years across most consumer privacy surveys, but a single-year, ten-point move is unusually large. Deloitte's researchers tie part of the jump to generative AI's rapid mainstream adoption during the same period, which introduced a new category of data-handling questions most consumers had never had to think about before, layered on top of the scams and account failures they were already contending with.
How has consumer worry about privacy changed since 2024?
Deloitte tracks the worry figure as a single annual line, which makes the year-over-year jump easy to see on its own. The 2025 reading of 70% follows 60% in 2024, and both readings come from the same survey instrument run on comparable US adult samples each spring, so the ten-point move reflects a genuine shift in stated attitude rather than a change in how the question was asked or who answered it.
Figure 1: US consumer worry about data privacy and security jumped ten points in a single year. Source: Deloitte, 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, 3,524 US adults, Q2 2025.
That single number sets up everything else in this post. Once worry climbs that fast, it tends to pull related attitudes with it, and Deloitte's 2025 edition shows exactly that pattern across the tradeoff question, generative AI sentiment, and reported trust in the companies collecting the data in the first place.
Which consumer privacy attitudes shifted most in 2025?
Three separate measures in Deloitte's 2025 survey moved together, and all three point the same direction: consumers are less willing to accept the current data bargain than they were a year ago. Only 48% of consumers now say the benefits of online services outweigh the privacy concerns of sharing their data, down from 58% in 2024. At the same time, 82% of consumers who use generative AI tools say the technology could be misused, up from 74% the year before.
Figure 2: Worry rose, the perceived data tradeoff soured, and GenAI misuse concern climbed, all in the same twelve months. Source: Deloitte, 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, Q2 2025.
The generative AI figures carry their own supporting detail: 33% of GenAI users say they have already encountered incorrect or misleading information from a tool they used, and 24% say they have personally experienced a data privacy issue connected to a GenAI product, not just a hypothetical worry about one.
Do most US consumers trust companies to protect their data?
No, and the gap between what companies do and what consumers want is wide. Only 27% of consumers have high or very high trust that the providers they use actually protect their personal data, according to Deloitte's 2025 survey, while 90% say tech companies should be doing more to protect privacy than they currently do. Transparency scores just as poorly: only 20% of consumers say the providers they use are "very clear" about what data they collect and how it gets used.
Figure 3: US consumers rank company transparency and their own willingness to share data low, even as trust in data protection stays under 30%. Source: Deloitte, 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, Q2 2025.
Consumers respond to that gap by holding back. Only 20% say it is "very easy" to control what gets collected about them, fewer than 10% say they are "very willing" to share sensitive financial, communication, or biometric data, and more than half say they are "not at all willing" to share it, even in exchange for a better experience. A privacy policy generator built to keep disclosures current will not close that trust gap by itself, but a vague or outdated policy is one of the fastest ways a site fails the "very clear" test consumers are already applying. For the broader data picture behind these attitudes, see our roundup of 75 data privacy statistics for 2026.
How common are digital security failures and scams for US consumers?
Fairly common, and that lived experience is likely feeding the rise in stated worry. 47% of US consumers experienced at least one digital security failure in the past year, and 27% experienced two or more, per Deloitte's 2025 survey. Separately, 58% encountered at least one scam attempt over the same period, meaning a majority of the sample dealt with some kind of attempted fraud regardless of whether it succeeded.
Figure 4: More than four in ten US consumers had at least one digital security failure in the past year. Derived by PrivacyTerms.io from Deloitte's disclosed cumulative failure rates (at least one failure: 47%; two or more: 27%). Source: Deloitte, 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, Q2 2025.
Security failures and identity theft are not the same event, but they share a root cause: exposed personal data. Identity theft alone cost the average US victim roughly $1,517 in 2025, according to our breakdown of identity theft losses in 2026, and much of that fraud starts with data that was collected, stored, or shared somewhere a consumer never fully agreed to.
Are US consumers aware of the privacy laws that apply to them?
Slowly, yes. 53% of consumers say they are aware of their country's privacy laws, according to Cisco's 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey, up from 46% in 2023 and the first time the figure has topped 50% since Cisco started tracking it in 2019.
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Cisco's full 2024 survey PDF was not independently re-accessible during this review; the 53% and 46% figures are drawn from Cisco's public consumer privacy survey summary and are widely corroborated across secondary industry coverage of the same summer 2024 study. Treat this as a medium-confidence, secondary-sourced figure alongside the higher-confidence Deloitte data cited elsewhere in this post.
Rising legal awareness has not translated into rising trust, which is the pattern running through every figure in this post: consumers increasingly know a law exists, know a data collection practice happened, and still do not believe the company on the other end will handle it responsibly.
How do 2026's key US privacy attitude figures compare?
| Metric | 2025 figure | Prior year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Worried about data privacy and security | 70% | 60% (2024) | Deloitte, 2025 |
| Say online benefits outweigh privacy concerns | 48% | 58% (2024) | Deloitte, 2025 |
| Say GenAI use could be misused | 82% | 74% (2024) | Deloitte, 2025 |
| Aware of their country's privacy laws | 53% | 46% (2023) | Cisco, 2024 |
Source: Deloitte 2025 Connected Consumer Survey; Cisco 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey.
Every figure in this table moved in the direction of more concern and less confidence, with one exception: legal awareness is climbing too, just not fast enough yet to close the trust gap.
The Bottom Line
US consumer privacy attitudes did not drift in 2025, they moved sharply. Worry climbed 10 points, faith that the data tradeoff is worth it fell 10 points, and suspicion of generative AI's data handling rose 8 points, all inside a single year, per Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey. Trust in how companies protect data remains stuck below 30%, and transparency scores just as low. For a site that collects personal information, the practical read is straightforward: consumers are already primed to distrust an unclear privacy policy, so a current, plainly written one is one of the few concrete signals a business can send that it is not part of the problem these numbers describe.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of US consumers worry about data privacy in 2026? 70% of US consumers say they worry about data privacy and security, according to Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey of 3,524 US adults conducted in the second quarter of 2025, up from 60% a year earlier.
Do most US consumers think sharing their data is worth it? No. Only 48% of US consumers believe the benefits of online services outweigh the privacy concerns of sharing their data, down from 58% in 2024, per Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey.
How many US consumers trust companies to protect their data? Only 27% of US consumers have high or very high trust that the providers they use protect their personal data, according to Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, while 90% believe tech companies should do more to protect privacy.
Are US consumers aware of privacy laws that apply to them? 53% of consumers say they are aware of their country's privacy laws, according to Cisco's 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey, up from 46% in 2023, the first time awareness has crossed the halfway mark since Cisco began tracking it in 2019.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Deloitte. (2025). "2025 Connected Consumer Survey." Sixth annual edition, 3,524 US consumers surveyed in Q2 2025; source of the 70% worry figure, the benefits-versus-concerns tradeoff, the trust and transparency scores, the security failure rates, and the GenAI-specific findings cited throughout this post.
- Cisco. (2024). "Consumer Privacy Survey." Summer 2024 double-blind survey; source of the 53% and 46% privacy law awareness figures, hedged above as secondary-sourced.
- Pew Research Center. (2023). "How Americans View Data Privacy." Survey of 5,101 US adults, May 15-21, 2023, providing longer-run context for the trust and control findings referenced in this post's companion coverage.
Note: All figures verified as of October 2026. Consumer privacy attitude data is refreshed at least twice a year as Deloitte, Cisco, Pew Research Center, and other named survey organizations publish new editions.
