80% of Canadian Businesses Don’t Inform Website Visitors of Third-Party Tracking

Data privacy and online surveillance transparency continue to be serious issues for Canadians. A newly released survey reveals that a vast majority of businesses in the country do not inform their website visitors of third-party tracking.

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The November 2020 study – conducted by CRM Essentials and sponsored by Zoho – surveyed 429 Canadian business leaders and employees and found that only 20% of respondents inform their website visitors that they use third-party tracking codes.

The data being collected and leveraged by third-party tracking can include IP addresses, behavioural data, social activity, transactional data, feedback, application usage data, and even information about a user’s devices and browsers. While this data is most often used for the purposes of personalizing ads, other uses can include developing analytics about user behaviour, allowing social media sharing, and more.

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Key survey findings:

• Only 38% of Canadian businesses have a well-defined, documented policy for customer data privacy that is strictly applied.
• Only 20% of respondents inform their website visitors that they use tracking codes from third-party companies.
• As many as 22.4% of Canadian businesses did not know that third parties can install code on their website without consent.
• Only 10% of Canadian businesses are completely comfortable with how third parties use the data.
• Only 21.6% of Canadian businesses say that third-party companies have done a good job of explaining what they use their customer data for.
• The most common purposes that Canadian businesses allowed third parties to install code on their websites were:
  • Sharing content on social media (26.6%)
  • Gathering analytics on who is consuming content (23.1%)
  • Tracking advertising campaigns (21.4%)
  • Tracking affiliate relationships for transactions (15.2%)
  • Plugins to perform functions like SEO, security comment capture, and more (13.8%)

Canada Compared to the United States

Almost twice as many Canadian businesses surveyed (22.4% CDN vs. 11.4% U.S.) said that they were unaware that third parties could install coding on their website without their consent as compared to U.S. businesses. Additionally, American businesses are more than three times as likely (31.8% U.S. vs. 10% CDN) to be very comfortable with how third parties use their customers’ data.

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