Pew – Americans’ Views About Data Collection and Security By Mary Madden and Lee Rainie: “Contrary to assertions that people “don’t care” about privacy in the digital age, this survey suggests that Americans hold a range of strong views about the importance of control over their personal information and freedom from surveillance in daily life. As earlier studies in this series have illustrated, Americans’ perceptions of privacy are varied in important ways and often overlap with concerns about personal information security and government surveillance. In practice, information scholars have noted that privacy is not something one can simply “have,” but rather is something people seek to “achieve” through an ongoing process of negotiation of all the ways that information flows across different contexts in daily life The data from the new Pew Research surveys suggest that Americans consider a wide array of privacy-related values to be deeply important in their lives, particularly when it comes to having a sense of control over who collects information and when and where activities can be observed When they are asked to think about all of their daily interactions – both online and offline – and the extent to which certain privacy-related values are important to them, clear majorities believe every dimension below is at least “somewhat important” and many express the view that these aspects of personal information control are “very important.” The full range of their views is captured in the chart below and more detailed analysis is explored after that.”