Special Eurobarometer 196: Data Protection

This opinion poll has been carried out at the request of the Directorate-General Internal Market, Unit E4 - Media and data protection, managed and organised by the Directorate-General Press and Communication ("Public Opinion Analysis" Sector). It was carried out between September 1 and September 30 2003, in all European Union countries, on behalf of the European Opinion Research Group (EORG: a consortium of market research and public opinion agencies, made out of INRA in Belgium - I.C.O. and GfK Ad Hoc Worldwide).
This report firstly assesses EU citizens’ views on the general issue of personal data privacy and examines the level of concern they feel on this subject. Respondents were then surveyed as to the level of trust they had in the acceptable use of personal data held by organisations such as banks, police, doctors, etc. Views were then gathered as to attitude towards specific aspects of data collection and data management covering such areas as confidence in the efficacity of the legal framework on data protection, security of information on the Internet, etc.
Individuals’ knowledge of legislation, complaints procedures, sanctions on law-breakers and rights to restrict the use of personal information, etc. were then analysed.

The results by volumes are distributed as follows:

• Volume A: Countries
• Volume AA: Groups of countries
• Volume A' (AP): Trends
• Volume AA' (AAP): Trends of groups of countries
• Volume B: EU/socio-demographics
• Volume B' (BP) : Trends of EU/ socio-demographics
• Volume C: Country/socio-demographics

Researchers may also contact GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: https://www.gesis.org/eurobarometer