BIZ LEVERAGES CONSUMER PERSONAL INFORMATION.

Ninety percent of U.S. businesses report leveraging personal information from search results as part of their marketing strategy, while 76% of consumers maintain they are not aware, or moderately aware, of how their information is being used, according to CompliancePoint, Duluth, Ga., an information security and risk management consultancy, which has released the results of its latest data privacy survey.

Of the businesses polled, 60.3% say they use customer search engine results for web retargeting, and an additional 32.7% indicate that they further use this for mobile marketing campaigns. While the majority of consumers (56%) report that they actually prefer for businesses to market to them based on their web searches, another 44% say that they think it "feels weird" to have a company know so much information about their online habits.

Furthermore, 77% of consumers indicate that they have clicked on one of the top-three search engine results, typically reserved for sponsored results. Business respondents report leveraging these online...