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Google: Love or hate it!

From The Atlantic:

"This morning, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a February survey analyzing Americans' feelings about online privacy. The main takeaway is something of a paradox: The majority of us are uncomfortable with personalized search and targeted ads. At the same, time, though, we're more satisfied than ever with the performance of search engines.

Taken together, the polling shows that there is a great uneasiness about the status quo of data collection on the Internet. And yet, people like using the Internet.

In phone calls with Pew, 65 percent of Internet users said it's generally "a bad thing" if a search engine collects information about individual searches and then uses it to rank someone's search results -- because it may limit the information you get online and what search results you see. Only 29 percent said this practice would generally be "a good thing," because it would offer better and more relevant search returns. Similarly, when the question was framed more personally, 73 percent said they would "not be okay" with being tracked (because it would be an invasion of privacy); only 23 percent said they'd be "okay" with tracking (because it would lead to better and more personalized search results).

Pew found a similar breakdown when the matter was framed around advertising rather than search: 68 percent of those surveyed said they were "not okay" with targeted advertising, because they didn't want their online behavior tracked and analyzed; only 28 percent were okay with it (explaining that it leads to more relevant ads and the like).

And yet: Despite all those high-percentage objections to the idea of being tracked, less than half of the people surveyed -- 38 percent -- said they knew of ways to control the data collected about them."


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