"Consumers, especially those in their first year online, are reluctant to provide much personal information to companies other than banks, according to a new study released Monday by research firm Jupiter Media Metrix. Additionally, the study found that the majority of users surveyed are resistant to models like Microsoft's HailStorm, in which a single company stores user information and gives it to other vendors, companies or to the user upon request.

The study tracked users who have been online for five or more years and those online for a year or less. It examined the differences between the two groups in their willingness to store personal information beyond name, address and zip code with third parties. The bulk of new users surveyed trusted no company, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they didn't trust any company with their personal information."

redux [09.02.00]
The Washington Post 'Opting In': A Privacy Paradox

"Some big computer out there knows all about Joan Schram. Its massive memory has stored the birth dates of family members and friends, the fact that she drives a Ford Explorer, and the names and birth dates of her American shorthair cat and rare Brazilian fila dog.

And she's thrilled about it.

Schram gave out the information herself, answering screen after screen of personal questions from LifeMinders Inc., a Herndon-based company that collects such data from consumers and e-mails them information in return ? reminders of important dates, tips on when it's time to treat the cat for ticks, and news and advertising targeted to their interests.

But like many Americans, the Kennedy Center employee also says she's uncomfortable with the thought that when she goes online, other Internet companies could be monitoring her wanderings and gathering the same kind of personal information that she freely gave over to LifeMinders. If somebody else knew about her Explorer, she says, "I'd be a little disconcerted."

It's one of the more puzzling conundrums of online life. While companies that capitalize on the Internet's powerful potential to invade privacy are denounced as villains of the information age, millions of people type out highly personal data and send it off to Web sites they've barely heard of, with no strong legal protection against misuse of the information."

redux [09.14.00]
Wired News Private Folks Really Tell All

"Nearly all Internet users say they are concerned about privacy online, but despite those fears nearly two-thirds of Web surfers have transmitted such highly personal information as a credit card number, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study, published by the Andersen Consulting Institute for Strategic Change and the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University, said 95 percent of consumers have significant concerns about their privacy online."

"But the researchers said they were surprised to find how often Internet users' actual behavior conflicted with those fears, calling it a "a hidden willingness to provide information online."

redux [02.15.01]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]

"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""