“Only 42% of Americans say they are willing to give up some privacy for national security, according to a new survey released by the Public Affairs Council, the national organization for public affairs professionals,” Quentin Fottrell reports for MarketWatch. “And that number goes down to 25% when it comes to Americans willing to trade their privacy for lower prices, the survey found.”
“Republicans (39%) are less likely than Democrats (45%) to say they are willing to trade some privacy for better national security,” Fottrell reports. “But Doug Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council, says this may be attributable to the fact that there’s a Democratic president in the White House. The country appears to be more polarized in recent years, too, he adds. Last year, the Internal Revenue Service was accused of targeting conservative groups and, in June, the IRS said a computer belonging to a key employee crashed in 2011, which made it difficult to see the history of who might have been targeted and why.”
“Some people with a Facebook profile or smartphone may not be aware that they’re already giving up a certain amount of privacy ‘every time they download an app,’ Pinkham says. (It’s the first time that the survey asked people if they’d give up a certain amount of privacy for other benefits like national security or lower prices),” Fottrell reports. “Despite concerns among consumer advocates about the privacy policies of companies such as Facebook and, and how much information they can glean from a person’s smartphone use, there’s been a surge in the trust Americans put in technology companies. Some 83% of respondents in the Public Affairs Council survey say technology companies are at least as trustworthy as the average major company, while only 53% of people felt that way when that question was posed in 2011.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: One question: How can an article like this not once mention Google, the poster child for trading privacy for “free” apps? (Gmail, which automatically scans emails in order to add contextual advertisements, for one of many examples.)
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. – Ronald Reagan, 1961
Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
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