Nearly half of all 20-24 year olds in the UK have stopped using a product or service because they were worried about how it was using their personal information, a gathering of loyalty professionals in Sydney was warned last night.

Matthew Heath, global chairman and chief strategy officer of LIDA London, M&C Saatchi’s customer relationship specialist, which was this month named the UK’s CRM agency of the year for the second year running, said the findings of a study conducted by UK brand consultancy Contagious flew in the face of prevailing wisdom that posits that “young adults” simply don’t care about how their data is used.

Heath pointed to the example of a coffee shop requiring someone’s date of birth in exchange for access to the store’s wifi as a case in point where there was no clearly demonstrated value exchange for the personal information.

“Obviously it makes sense to me that Netflix is going to have a record of what DVDs I’ve watched. But it is off-putting to see a targeted ad based on an email I have sent – it makes me think my email is being read by someone,” the study by Contagious said one if its research subjects asserted.

Heath added that suspicion of Google’s Gmail was clearly growing.

However he added that once personalisation was perfected, it offered enormous opportunities for organisations. “It is both our biggest challenge as well as our biggest opportunity,” he said, adding that “it was all about segmentation, but the world is just not like that anymore.”

Hyper personalisation was a massive opportunity with 31% of consumers saying they would be more likely to make purchases if they were offered personalised experiences such as product recommendations or tailored content.

Here’s some great examples of what companies have achieved.

In other developments, Heath talked about how real-time data was now starting to be really harnessed by organisations to deliver some spectacular results. Foot traffic in retail areas is a case in point.