What You Do Is Really What You Believe about Privacy

By Michael Osterman
in

There is a seemingly endless barrage of news stories about how an email provider, a social networking site, a credit card processor or some other vendor has violated somebody’s privacy by divulging credit card information or Social Security numbers or Wi-Fi login credentials. While the tone of these articles generally is meant to reflect the perceived user indignation at these violations of privacy, how much actual indignation is there, really?

A study published by the Ponemon Institute yesterday found that while people say they’re concerned about privacy—more than four in five users of social networking tools expressed concern about their security while using these tools—the bottom line is that they really are not:

  • More than one-half of the individuals surveyed take no precautions to actively protect their computers or their data while using social networking sites.
  • About two in five users post their physical home address when using social networking tools.
  • Assuming that a social networking provider did not protect their privacy, more than 40% of users would still use that provider.
  • More than nine in ten users don’t review a Web site’s policy on privacy before they use the site.

If these results are to be believed—and there’s certainly no reason they shouldn’t be—the vast majority of people say they’re concerned about privacy, but their actions indicate that they really are not. Many say that they are upset when a vendor gathers or reveals personally identifiable information about them, but then they tweet or post their location or vacation plans or some other equally confidential information.

Now, to be fair, if you want to reveal your own information, no matter how confidential, you have that right. And a vendor clearly does not have (or shouldn’t have) the same rights over your information unless they have specifically reserved those rights. If a vendor does share your information or use it in some way, it’s generally because they have reserved this right as stated in their privacy policy—something that fewer than one in ten of us actually read. We should.

Published June 22, 2010