Most U.S. consumers don’t have a high level of confidence that their personal information will be safeguarded by retailers with whom they shop, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.

Only 14% of adults surveyed were “very confident” that companies and retailers they do business with will protect the sensitive data collected about them, and 46% said they were “somewhat confident.” More than one-third of respondents expressed low levels of assuredness, with 21% “not too confident” and 15% “not at all confident” in the ability of retailers to securely handle their information.

“The results were not outside of the realm of what we expected,” says Aaron W. Smith, associate director of research at Pew. “We saw a lack of confidence in entities people interact with daily, and that was very consistent with the public climate given the steady stream of hacks, breaches and cyberattacks by hostile entities that have been in the news. The broader population feels as though the dissemination and use of their personal information is out of their control.”

The Pew Research Center’s study, “Americans and Cybersecurity,” is based on a phone survey in spring 2016 of 1,040 U.S. adults across all 50 states.

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