Don't track on me: Americans dislike cyber-monitoring

October 2, 2009

Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania released a survey this week saying that most Americans object to companies tracking their online movements, and that the number objecting rises once respondents are informed of the methods online marketers use to follow them.

Respondents overwhelmingly supported hypothetical laws designed to set higher privacy standards online. Sixty-nine percent said that there should be a law giving people the right to view all the information a website collects about them, and 92 percent supported one that would require marketers to delete all information about a person upon request.

The survey also included nine true or false questions designed to assess how knowledgeable respondents are about privacy policy on the internet. On all but one question, a majority of respondents gave incorrect answers, suggesting that internet users are typically not well informed about internet privacy issues.

The results were more or less evenly distributed across age groups. Joseph Turow, one of the study's authors and a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania told the New York Times that "[w]e sometimes think that the younger adults in the United States don't care about this stuff, and I would suggest that's an exaggeration."

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