Nearly half of Americans will not hand their phone number to a carrier, a tech company, or a government agency, according to research Cloaked published on July 7, 2026. The privacy technology company surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers and found that 42 percent trust none of fifteen major institutions, spanning telecom carriers, federal agencies, and technology firms, to handle their phone data responsibly. That distrust is not abstract. It shows up as concrete withholding behavior across the channels marketers rely on most: social media, online retail, dating apps, and loyalty programs.

The findings arrive as digital advertising leans further into automated, machine-led buying systems that depend on contact data to connect targeting, measurement, and attribution. If a meaningful share of the population keeps that data out of the pipeline entirely, the signal base underlying identity resolution narrows, regardless of how sophisticated the matching technology becomes.

What Cloaked found in its consumer trust data

Cloaked's research centers on a single, structural question: when consumers are asked to name which institutions they trust with their phone data, how many say none at all? The answer, according to the company, is 42 percent. Respondents were presented with a list of fifteen entities, including carriers, the Federal Communications Commission, the federal government broadly, and major technology companies, and asked to select which ones they trusted. A plurality selected nothing.

Trust that did exist concentrated narrowly. The Do Not Call Registry ranked as the single most trusted entity, selected by 23 percent of respondents. Verizon followed at 13 percent, the federal government at 13 percent, the FCC at 12 percent, and Apple at 12 percent. No single institution crossed the quarter mark. Generational splits were pronounced. Baby boomers were the most likely age group to trust the Do Not Call Registry, at 40 percent, compared with just 21 percent of Gen Z respondents. Gen Z, in turn, led all other generations in trust toward Apple, at 15 percent, and toward the federal government, at 17 percent.

The behavioral consequences of that distrust extend directly into commerce and marketing channels. Forty-three percent of respondents said they avoid sharing their real phone number online altogether. Thirty-three percent specifically will not give online retailers their real number, adding friction to the point where commerce platforms attempt to capture identity data at checkout or account creation. These figures describe a population actively engineering gaps into the identity graphs that targeting and attribution systems depend on.

The 95 percent question

Perhaps the most pointed finding in the dataset concerns what Cloaked describes as a value-exchange test. Respondents were asked whether they would opt into sharing personal data if doing so meaningfully reduced the volume of spam calls and texts they receive. At a proposed 80 percent reduction, over a third of Americans, 36 percent, said they would opt in, with Gen Z the most willing generation at 39 percent and baby boomers the most resistant at 33 percent refusing outright.

The number that matters more for marketers sits at the upper bound of that test. Even when Cloaked raised the promised reduction to 95 percent, a near-total elimination of the spam problem, 25 percent of respondents said they would still withhold their personal data. A quarter of the population, in other words, will not trade identity information for spam relief regardless of how effective the tradeoff is framed. For an industry that has spent years building consent flows premised on the idea that a sufficiently attractive value exchange unlocks data sharing, that finding sets a hard ceiling on how far incentive design alone can move behavior.

Phishing, not robocalls, remains the format consumers fear most

A companion figure in the dataset addresses which spam format consumers find most convincing, and by extension, most dangerous from a fraud perspective. Forty percent of respondents identified phishing emails as the most convincing spam format they encounter, ahead of robocalls and spam texts. That finding carries a counterintuitive edge. Robocalls generate the most day-to-day irritation, but phishing emails pose the sharper risk, since a convincing message is more likely to prompt an actual click, reply, or disclosure of sensitive information.

The distinction matters for any marketing team running email-based acquisition or retention campaigns. If phishing sets the psychological baseline for what "convincing" looks like in a consumer's inbox, legitimate marketing emails compete against that baseline every time they land. A subject line or sender name that too closely resembles the patterns scammers exploit risks triggering the same skepticism, even when the underlying message is entirely legitimate.

Context from the FBI's cybercrime data

Cloaked's consumer-behavior findings sit alongside a separate data point drawn from federal law enforcement records. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center 2025 Annual Report, cited directly in Cloaked's research documentation, the bureau received 1,008,597 cybercrime complaints in 2025, up from 49,711 in 2001, an increase of 1,929 percent over twenty-four years. Reported losses crossed 20 billion dollars for the first time in 2025, a 26 percent increase over 2024's 16.6 billion dollars, and more than 1,170 times the 17.8 million dollars reported in 2001.

Those figures corroborate a pattern PPC Land reported on July 5, when the FBI's own 2025 Internet Crime Report documented that same total of 1,008,597 complaints and 20.877 billion dollars in losses, including a newly isolated category of 22,364 complaints and 893,346,472 dollars in losses tied specifically to schemes referencing artificial intelligence tools. The consistency between Cloaked's citation and the underlying federal report indicates the scale of the fraud environment now shaping how consumers relate to their own contact information. Americans currently file nearly 3,000 cybercrime complaints with the FBI every day, a volume that has grown steadily since the center opened in 2000.

Why consumers screen calls, and what marketers miss when they do

Beyond raw distrust figures, the broader dataset documents how spam fatigue has reshaped ordinary phone behavior. Americans receive an average of 16 spam calls and 9 spam texts per month. Two-thirds of respondents, 66 percent, report having missed an important call because they screened an unknown number, and a third, 33 percent, specifically missed a call from a doctor, hospital, or healthcare provider as a result.

Other missed-caller categories documented in the underlying data include employers or recruiters, cited by 18 percent of respondents, pharmacies or insurance providers at 16 percent, and financial institutions at 15 percent. Roughly 8 in 10 Americans rarely or never answer calls or texts from numbers they do not recognize, a behavior pattern that directly undercuts any marketing or customer-service strategy still reliant on outbound phone contact as a primary channel.

On self-protection measures, more than half of respondents, 53 percent, had enabled their carrier's spam filtering feature. Forty-three percent said they avoid giving out their real number online as a general practice, and 41 percent had registered with the Do Not Call Registry. Those numbers describe a population that has already adopted defensive habits well before any single company's opt-in flow or consent banner reaches them.

Irritation and danger do not track together

One of the more counterintuitive threads running through the dataset is the gap between which spam format irritates people most and which one actually fools them. Robocalls topped the annoyance ranking by a wide margin: 58 percent of respondents named robocalls their single biggest frustration, well ahead of spam texts at 20 percent and phishing emails at 14 percent. Yet when the same respondents were asked which format was most likely to cause them to accidentally engage, meaning click, reply, or otherwise interact without meaning to, robocalls fell to the bottom of the list at just 17 percent. Phishing emails led that measure at 32 percent, followed by social media direct messages at 24 percent and spam texts at 18 percent.

That inversion matters because it separates two things marketers often conflate: how loudly consumers complain about a channel and how vulnerable they actually are within it. A channel people have grown skilled at ignoring, robocalls, poses comparatively little residual risk. A channel people have not yet learned to distrust as reflexively, phishing email, remains the one most capable of prompting an unintended action. For any brand running legitimate email campaigns, that gap is a caution: the annoyance a channel generates is a poor proxy for how carefully consumers are screening it.

Where consumers draw the line on their number

The specific platforms and contexts where Americans refuse to share their real phone number extend well beyond retail. Social media drew the sharpest resistance, with 55 percent of respondents saying they refuse to give out their real number there. Dating apps followed at 30 percent, rewards program sign-ups at 26 percent, and even professional networking, specifically LinkedIn, prompted avoidance from nearly one in four respondents, 24 percent. That a platform built around verified professional identity still triggers phone number withholding at that rate suggests the resistance is closer to a general default than a response to any single platform's reputation.

The regulatory backdrop

The Federal Communications Commission has pushed for stricter identity verification requirements for phone carriers in recent years, an effort aimed at reducing the volume of spoofed and fraudulent calls reaching consumers. Cloaked's research frames that regulatory push against a specific practical obstacle: getting Americans to actually hand over the identity data such verification systems would require is a separate and much harder challenge than mandating the systems themselves. If over a third of consumers will not share their information even in exchange for a near-total reduction in spam, the political and commercial case for carrier-level identity verification depends on convincing a resistant public, not simply building the technical infrastructure.

That tension connects to a wider pattern of eroding institutional trust around AI and data handling that PPC Land has tracked across multiple studies over the past several months. Cloaked's own April 2026 survey found that only 18 percent of Americans trust AI systems to keep their personal data secure, with nearly one in three admitting to providing fake personal information to AI platforms altogether. Generational splits in that earlier study mirrored the pattern visible in the new phone-data research: baby boomers were most likely to say they would leave a platform if their data was shared with government agencies, at 51 percent, compared with 37 percent of Gen Z, while Gen Z reported feeling the most powerless to protect its data from AI systems, at 59 percent.

A separate industry snapshot, published as part of PPC Land's June 28 coverage of the week following Cannes Lions 2026, documented how identity infrastructure pressures were compounding across the advertising ecosystem at the same moment automation was accelerating. That coverage connected a Usercentrics survey of 11,000 respondents across seven markets, finding that one in four consumers had cancelled a subscription or service specifically over concerns about AI and data use, with 52 percent saying they would pay a premium of roughly 7 percent more for products from companies they trust with their data. The overlap between that willingness-to-pay figure and Cloaked's 95 percent spam-reduction threshold points toward a consistent finding across separate research efforts: a meaningful share of consumers treat their identity data as something closer to a red line than a negotiable asset, regardless of how the exchange is framed.

Methodology and data provenance

Cloaked surveyed 1,000 Americans in June 2026 regarding their experiences with spam and their willingness to share personal information. Respondents were screened for approval status and deduplicated to ensure one response per participant. The sample comprised men at 41 percent, women at 57 percent, and non-binary respondents at 1 percent, spanning four generational cohorts: Gen Z at 16 percent, millennials at 48 percent, Gen X at 25 percent, and baby boomers at 10 percent.

For questions asking respondents to estimate numeric values, Cloaked calculated averages using the interquartile range method to reduce the influence of outliers. Questions permitting multiple selections were included as asked; percentages for those questions are based on the total respondent count and will not sum to 100 percent. Percentages elsewhere in the dataset may not sum to 100 percent due to rounding. The cybercrime complaint and loss figures referenced throughout the research were sourced from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center 2025 Annual Report, and reflect complaints submitted directly to the center by the public; the underlying report notes that actual cybercrime losses may exceed the figures reported, given the likelihood of underreporting.

What this means for identity-dependent advertising

For an advertising industry increasingly dependent on phone numbers, emails, and other contact identifiers to stitch together targeting, measurement, and attribution across a fragmenting media landscape, Cloaked's findings describe a structural constraint rather than a temporary sentiment. The 42 percent institutional-distrust figure and the 25 percent hard-refusal figure at a 95 percent spam-reduction threshold both point toward a segment of the population that current consent and value-exchange models cannot reach, no matter how the terms are adjusted.

That constraint compounds an existing measurement problem the industry has already been reckoning with. As identity resolution vendors compete to fill the gap left by shrinking third-party signals, the raw material those systems depend on, consumers' willingness to supply accurate contact data in the first place, is shrinking in parallel. Whether that produces a lasting shift toward first-party, consent-first data strategies or simply raises the cost of acquiring usable identity signals is a question the industry has not yet resolved.

Timeline

  • 2000: The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center opens, beginning its tracking of cybercrime complaints filed by the public.
  • 2001: IC3 receives 49,711 complaints for the year, establishing an early baseline for cybercrime reporting volume.
  • 2024: Reported cybercrime losses reach 16.6 billion dollars, according to IC3 data cited in Cloaked's research.
  • June 2026: Cloaked fields its survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers on spam behavior, institutional trust, and willingness to share personal data.
  • 2025 (full year): IC3 receives 1,008,597 cybercrime complaints and documents losses surpassing 20 billion dollars for the first time, a 26 percent increase over 2024.
  • July 7, 2026: Cloaked publishes its consumer research findings on phone data distrust, spam behavior, and identity infrastructure pressure.

Summary

Who: Cloaked, a consumer privacy technology company, surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults across four generational cohorts on spam behavior and institutional data trust.

What: The research found that 42 percent of Americans trust none of fifteen major carriers, technology companies, or government agencies with their phone data. Twenty-five percent said they would still withhold personal information even if spam fell 95 percent. Forty-three percent avoid sharing their real phone number online, and 33 percent will not give online retailers their real number. Forty percent named phishing emails as the most convincing spam format they encounter.

When: Cloaked fielded the survey in June 2026 and published the findings on July 7, 2026.

Where: The survey covered adults across the United States, spanning Gen Z, millennial, Gen X, and baby boomer respondents.

Why: The findings matter for the advertising and marketing industry because phone numbers and other contact identifiers underpin targeting, attribution, and commerce data capture across an increasingly automated ad stack. A structural, generationally consistent gap in institutional trust, one that resists even near-total reductions in the spam problem it is meant to address, sets a practical ceiling on how much identity data any consent or incentive design can realistically unlock.