Privacy In America: New Pew Interactive Reveals Different Perspectives After Snowden
The majority of Americans feel their privacy is being challenged, the latest Pew report reveals. Which makes sense, considering
Who is invading our privacy doesn't change the fact that Americans are uncomfortable with it. A vast majority of Americans only trust the government and advertisers to do the right thing "only some of the time," according to Pew. In the survey, 91 percent of adults think consumers have "lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies." The government accessing information shared on social networking sites concerns 70 percent of adults and 80 percent think Americans "should be concerned about the government's monitoring of phone calls and internet communications." Unsurprisingly, responders who had heard "a lot" about government surveillance programs considered more information to be "very sensitive."
Regularly hearing about government surveillance wasn't the only factor that affected responders. Participants who had Googled themselves ("self searchers") were much more likely to see their information as "very sensitive" than those who had not self-searched. Obviously, everyone surveyed agreed that a social security number was very sensitive information but how about your relationship history? Or the content of your text messages? Once you start breaking down the answers by demographics, you begin to see a wide variety in what Americans consider sensitive information.
You can see a detailed demographic breakdown for each of the most sensitive categories by selecting an issue below:
Pew took the demographic differences one step further in creating this Privacy Profile interactive. Select one of the profiles below -- taken directly from Pew's Privacy Perception focus groups -- to see the different perspectives:
For their 'Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era' report, Pew surveyed 1,537 English-speaking adults. Of those responders, 607 people participated in additional surveys over the course of a year which included occasional hour-long focus groups. From these individuals, Pew created aggregated privacy profiles -- they used real answers from the focus groups to create profiles like Joe, a 30 year old black man who attended some college and uses social media. There's also the 19-year-old Hispanic teen, Jack, who doesn't use social media and told the focus group, "if someone pays enough, nothing is really private. Only way I see to really keep private, you have to stay off [the] Web."
Pew created nine profiles for their interactive; do your views on privacy match the person that's closest to you, demographically?
Demographics aside, which of Pew's profiles match your attitude toward privacy?
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