It is known that Americans highly value the privacy of their personal information and online communications. Unfortunately, they have little faith that the government and private companies will actually protect their data. According to a new report by the Pew Research Center, more than nine in ten adults said that controlling who gets access to their private information and what information those people can see is important to them, yet half of the people surveyed felt they had little or no control over what is collected by the government and corporations.
Although respondents to the online survey conducted in 2014 and early 2015 said they have taken some actions to protect their privacy (such as deleting the web tracking software known as cookies), few had resorted to more serious measures like encrypting their personal data. Perhaps that was because two-thirds of those surveyed said they didn’t believe it would be very hard for a determined person or organization to ferret out their personal information online.