美国国家公共电台 NPR Most Americans Feel They've Lost Control Of Their Online Data

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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

As Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg testified for Congress today, we sat wondering, how much do Americans care about their online privacy? What's OK for companies to collect about you, and what's not? So we went out here in Washington, D.C., and asked.

MICHAEL WATSON: Things like purchasing preferences probably seem OK. But anything of a personal nature I would think should be off-limits.

ASHLEY WILLIAMS: Of course Social Securities and bank information, all that - that's a little bit more private.

WATSON: I think I have some control. But I tend to trust the companies to protect me a little bit.

WILLIAMS: To me, the whole them knowing what I like - you know, the ads and stuff...

MELANIE FINE: When you, like, search something and then you go on Facebook and there's an ad for it, that's really creepy.

WILLIAMS: ...To me that's not that big of a deal. That's fine. Whatever.

FINE: I mean, in a perfect world they wouldn't use anything that I didn't specifically tell them, sure, here's some information about me. But we don't really live in that world.

KELLY: That's Melanie Fine (ph) along with Michael Watson (ph) and Ashley Williams (ph). For a broader view we turned to Lee Rainie. He directs Internet and technology research at Pew. And he's been polling Americans on these issues for years. He told us the picture that the data paints is complicated.

LEE RAINIE: Americans are all over the place when it comes to privacy. The most fundamental level, when you ask them the straight-on question, do you care about it or not, they do care. When you then talk to them about specific tradeoffs, they're a little bit more in a transactional frame of mind. I'm going to give up a little bit of personal information. What am I going to get in return? But the one thing I think that's predominant in our data now is that Americans are confused about what's happening. They don't exactly know what's being collected. They don't know what's being done with it once the data are collected. And they're totally freaked out about the number of data breaches¹ that have occurred.

KELLY: So it sounds like Americans are not feeling in control of their online data.

RAINIE: Exactly. Three-quarters of Americans say that control matters a lot to them, but 91 percent of Americans say that they feel that all Americans have lost control of their data and don't really know what they would do to recapture some of that control.

KELLY: Well, let's drill down on some of the specifics. What type of data were people just fine with having shared, and what seems to cross a line?

RAINIE: So their basic purchasing habits - they are not very worried about them being captured and used. The cultural tastes they have, even their political views and religious views don't register very high on things that they consider sensitive. They are very concerned about their Social Security numbers, their health information, the content of private communications - what's going on in their email and texts like that. So not all information is created equal for people, and not all people share the same sort of boundary lines.

KELLY: What about generational differences? Did you find that, say, millennials are more blase² about their online privacy than the baby boomers?

RAINIE: There's a really interesting generational story that isn't quite what the stereotype³ would have it. Yes, younger people are much more active online, much more forgiving of some of the circumstances when their data are captured and used in some ways to deliver products and services to them. But they're also more vigilant⁴ than their elders in monitoring. They watch what's posted about them. They watch what pictures their name is tagged in. And they're very concerned about the way that they present themselves online. So they curate their identity and their reputation very aggressively.

KELLY: Mark Zuckerberg, as we mentioned, he's before Congress today. He'll be back there tomorrow. Lots of questions about the role that regulation could play in preserving people's privacy. Do you have any advice to lawmakers based from your research as lawmakers think about where to draw the line and how to police a company like Facebook?

RAINIE: One of the reasons we intensively studied privacy since 2013 and the first revelations by Edward Snowden about government surveillance was that we wanted to see for ourselves what the bright lines were that Americans would draw because we knew that both companies and the government would love to have some guidance about where the bright lines are. And the maddeningly complicated thing about this process is that different Americans draw their lines at different places. Contexts and the specific conditions under which people share their information matters a lot. And their time of life matters a lot. The bargain that they're being offered matters a lot. So there aren't very pronouncedly clear bright lines for all Americans in all ways.

KELLY: You're kind of saying as Congress seeks to fix this, it's not quite clear what this is. Different people define this problem really differently.

RAINIE: Yes, there are certain broad tendencies. And I think Americans would very clearly love a lot more transparency, a lot more control over their data, a lot more information about when problems occur. But there are still great variances⁵ even on those questions. So it would be hard for anybody wanting to regulate in this space to sort of say, OK, these are the absolute moments when all Americans would be happy with regulation, and these are the moments when people would be happy with the companies being in control of things. It's a much more fluid kind of situation that depends on people in their own individual circumstances.

KELLY: That's Lee Rainie, director of Internet and technology research at Pew. Thanks so much for talking to us today.

RAINIE: Thanks, Mary Louise.