Last year Apple was the 14th most trusted company in America, and Google was the 19th, according to the Ponemon Institute’s privacy report, released today. Facebook most recently made an appearance on the list in 2009, as did AOL, while Yahoo dropped off in 2010.

“There’s been a lot of media coverage about companies like Google, Facebook [and] Apple and privacy,” Ponenmon’s executive director, Susan Jayson told me this morning. “Consumers are concerned about their privacy, and this kind of media exposure, plus their personal experiences, all contribute to people getting concerned.”

That’s something the study, which reached over 7,000 Americans, made clear. Almost half, 49 percent, of respondents remembered receiving at least one data breach notification in the past year, telling them that some company had some kind of intrusion or leak that had exposed their personal data.

Identity Thief, the movie

People’s biggest concern is identity theft: 61 percent of respondents highlighted it as the most significant privacy-related threat. It’s become such a common fear that it’s the topic of an upcoming movie: Identity Thief.

“Protection against identity theft keeps coming up in our research,” Jayson said. “People are very concerned about becoming the target of a thief … which includes medical identity theft and credit card identity theft.”

And what should be the safest places sometimes are not. Jayson’s own mother-in-law had her credit cards and other personal information stolen when checking into a Toussaint, Arizona hospital, and identity thieves indulged in a multi-thousand-dollar shopping marathon at her expense while she was sick.

Perception is the biggest problem for today’s top technology companies, Jayon says. While giants like Google provide immense value, a huge amount of personal data is tied up in your Google identity, especially when linked to your Android-based mobile phone or tablet. Similarly, Apple’s iCloud is wonderful for backing up an old phone and restoring all your contacts, data, apps, and more on a new phone, but it comes at the cost of sharing a great deal of information that gets stored at a corporate data center. And while both Google and Apple have been very good about protecting people’s information, the worry seems to remain.

Facebook, of course, might be the company that knows the most about us, and it’s continually in the public eye for confusing privacy policies, real or imagined gaffes, and a perception that the company is always trying to make more data public.

“Companies are in a bind,” Jayson says. “They don’t want to tell criminals exactly what they’re doing, but they do want to let consumers know that they’re putting in safeguards. And people do love convenience — so they use crummy passwords but still expect companies to protect them.”

Interestingly, one of the biggest privacy challenges that people identified is their own government. ”People are getting concerned about government intrusion into their lives … government surveillance via drones, and agencies like the TSA and DHS,” Jayson told me.

Here are the top 20 companies in America for privacy, as rated by consumers:

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce via photopin cc

Trust is so basic to business that it is rarely discussed in an analytical and accessible way. The book “The Speed of Trust” offers critical advice for entrepreneurs on how to actively manage trust in order to accelerate growth and reduce costs, while avoiding missteps. The more trust within a company, the faster it can move with lower costs. Think of the adverse impact 9/11 had on the time and cost of air travel — longer lines and more security — because of the damage it did to trust.

The speed at which you can assess and extend trust determines how fast your business can grow because it affects every relationship. That is, relationships with employees, new hires, business partners, investors, and customers. I expect discussion of trust – it’s meaning, development and measurement – will rise as social networking begins to dictate who consumers are influenced by. For instance, Ebay was built entirely on community trust through its rating systems. As Seth Godin notes, today Yelp is drives companies to make better products based on customer reviews.

Why listen to the author?

It’s fair to say that Stephen M. R. Covey has spent his life and career studying the principles in this book. He is the son and business partner of Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which was named the most influential business books of the twentieth century.

The Big Ideas:

The author does a masterful job of clearly dividing trust into four core components: integrity, intent, capability, and result. The first two define character; the latter two define competence. Measuring where trust falls short with any of these components provides a road map for how to repair, build, or extend trust. Furthermore, the book articulates how to build trust with more than a dozen concrete actions. Finally, the book provides helpful rules to prioritize your trust investments.

Integrity. Without integrity you have no foundation on which to place trust. Covey defines integrity as being honest, telling the truth, and leaving the correct impression. Beyond honesty, integrity requires three things:

• Congruence: Behavior consistent with your values inspires trust.

• Humility: What is right has to be more important than being right.

• Courage: When the right action is hard, integrity requires courage.

Intent. The author defines intent as plan or purpose, and breaks it into three components:

• Motive: This is the “why” of intent. The most motive trust-inspiring motive is one that shows genuine care for your employees or customers. If your motive doesn’t have this, then be prepared to pay a “trust tax.”

• Agenda: What do you intend to do based on your motive? The agenda that inspires the greatest trust is mutually beneficial.

• Behavior: This is the actual action that results from the motive and agenda. The behavior that inspires the greatest trust is acting in the best interests of others.  As an entrepreneur, I focus on customer and partner relationships that focus on shared win outcomes.

Capability. Do you have the ability to accomplish the required task? This is critical, since you won’t deliver without it. The author breaks down capability into four key parts: talent, attitude, knowledge, and style. The more these suit the needs of the situation, the higher the competence. As I assess investment opportunities, I often focus on management team capabilities: can they meet the demands that a company’s high growth requires.

Results. The most powerful and simplest test for trust is results — not just what the results were, but how they were accomplished. This is critical for entrepreneurs thinking of starting a new venture. In interviewing senior executives, I place the greatest weight on proven results, their contribution to prior successes and its relevance to our company needs.

Inspiring/Investing In Trust. The author identifies 13 different initiatives entrepreneurs can take to inspire trust. Since creating trust in your workplace is essential to driving growth, the key issue is how and where to make those trust investments. Ask yourself these questions:

• What can you gain from investing in trust?

• What are you risking by putting resources toward building trust?

• What is the character/competence of the individual or organization in which you are making the investment?

Clearly, the lower the risk, the safer the investment. The higher the risk, the more you need to see strong character, competence, and prior results to justify the investment.

Lessons Applied

I felt this book had clear relevance to many of my startups and portfolio companies. As a model for my life – I have always felt the more trust you develop, the more effective you will be as an entrepreneur. The same goes for personal relationships. Most relevant to an investor, our fund places a lot of trust (shown in-part through multimillion dollar investments) in the entrepreneurs in which we invest. As a result, we focus on their track record, capabilities, and how well they manage their money, as a predictor of how they will use our money. We also seek to provide support through a board of advisors consisting of other executives with a track record of success and capital efficiency, to help improve the team’s capabilities.

At a glance:
Title: The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
Authors: Stephen M.R. Covey, Stephen R. Covey, Rebecca R. Merrill
Publisher: Free Press
Length: 384 pages

(Editor’s note: Javier Rojas is a managing director leading U.S. investment activities for Kennet Partners. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

Much of this dynamic has been enabled by technology that allows us to create and form virtual networks in a very efficient way. By connecting with one another online, the speed and scale of the network can grow so quickly that it is impossible to know each other on a personal level. All we can care about is, does a person have what I want, and can I trust them to give it to me.

But would collaborative consumption work in China? China is a rapidly developing economy and society. However, in my opinion, it still has some obvious obstacles to fully implementing collaborative consumption models. A major part of how collaborative consuption functions is “Can I trust them to give this to me or not steal/ruin what I am giving them?”

But in China, this is exactly biggest problem — the lack of trust.

There are already some well-known companies based on the collaborative consumption in the U.S. Airbnb is a website that allows people with a spare room or empty home to rent it out to other people for a fee. It was a take-off of Couchsurfing.org, a non-profit social network that connected backpackers with lend a spare beds and couches for free. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, Getaround is a car sharing site that allows people to rent their cars to people when they are not using them. Taskrabbit is a site that allows people to sell their spare time to other people. For example, if I need to someone to pick up my dry-cleaning or do my grocery shopping, I can find someone available on Taskrabbit. Lendingclub is a site that matches money lenders and borrowers. Skillshare is a site that allows people to teach people their skills.

There are a lot of new models like this that are changing society from hyper-consumption to hyper-utlization. It makes sense for us to maximize the value of our things, so they’re not wasted. Sharing things means we don’t always have to own something, but can instead borrow it from someone else. This makes it cheaper for someone who doesn’t need it all the time, and generates extra money for the person lending it out.

Rachel Botsman gave a TED Talk in 2010 and explained that this model of sharing helps the world by extending the term that is often used for environmental protection “reduce, re-use, recycle” and now “re-distribute.” The implications of this are massive. It can greatly reduce the need to manufacture or produce as many things in the world, thereby saving the environment or using up tons of unnecessary energy, electricity, money and other resources. However, the collaborative consumption model might worry existing companies because they will no longer be able to sell as much. (I guess its payback time for all the companies that purposefully manufactured products to last less time that they potentially could, just so we’d have to buy more.)

Again, a pre-cursor to us using such sites or collaborative consumption platforms is trust. However, the Internet over the past ten years has already started to build-in mechanisms that solve such issues. There are ratings, reviews, comments, background checks, and scores. Botsman points out in her talk that, since we spend so much time online, we are leaving traces of our personality and credibility everywhere. Instead of people needing a credit history to prove they are reliable, all the transactions, comments and interactions they’ve made online will form the value of our “social currency.”

You can see it on the streets here in China; people don’t really trust one another. Usually it is the foreigner that is told to hold their bag in front of them, in case they are robbed. But in Beijing at least, I see Chinese people holding their bags in front too. There are so many people in China that the range of characters and trustworthiness immensely varies too. Even Chinese people tell me there is a trust issue here. When stories stick in people’s psyche about people cheating each other at the market or government officials being corrupt, it makes you wonder, who can you trust?

In the e-commerce space, trust is an issue that has had to be resolved for tech companies to function properly. Alipay, the payment gateway of Alibaba (the PayPal of China) solved much of the problem by working as an escrow system. Money is paid through Alipay, the goods are delivered, and when goods are received the money is released to the seller. China needed this system before it could really grow into such a huge e-commerce industry. However collaborative consumption and e-commerce are different, whereby collaborative consumption has a stronger focus on the person.

I know friends who are working on collaborative consumption models in China and have the vision to unlock the full potential of assets, reduce waste, and save the environment. This is a great mission and should be pursued in China. However I think that it will be a challenge to make it widely embraced in China, at least now.

This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner based in China.

Barter image via ShutterStock