Pew: Americans Would Trade Privacy For Safety

9 Ways To Bulletproof Your Privacy Policy

Ever consider your privacy a bargaining chip? Apparently it is.

Americans are more apt to share their personal information in exchange for greater physical security than for savings on their utility bill, according to a Pew Research Center study released Thursday. The study explored how Americans balance their privacy concerns in exchange for cost savings, products, services, or other benefits.

The center surveyed 461 US adults and nine online focus groups of 80 people for the study. It turns out that the tipping-point issues in balancing these privacy concerns include: how valuable the benefit survey participants will receive is in return for their personal information, how they view the company or organization that is collecting the data, the length of time that the data is retained, and what is done with this data once it is collected.

Pew researchers used six hypothetical scenarios to gauge under which circumstances survey participants were willing to exchange their personal information for a product or service.

Take the case of surveillance cameras. When presented with a scenario where a company wanted to install high-resolution, face-recognition security cameras within the workplace after a spate of employees had their personal belongings stolen, 54% of the study's respondents said it would be acceptable.

Online health records also received a favorable response from a majority of those who participated in the study. Fifty-two percent of respondents agreed it would be acceptable for their doctor's office to upload and host their health records on a new health information Website. However, the tradeoff would be that patients would have access to their own health records, and appointment scheduling would potentially become easier. The scenario also said that the office promises it is a secure site.

[Read Uber Settles "God View" and Data Breach Investigation.]

But four other scenarios presented to the study's participants failed to win as much broad support as the surveillance cameras and health records:

"There will be no 'SMART' anythings in this household," one survey respondent stated in the report. "I have enough personal data being stolen by the government and sold [by companies] to spammers now."

Also, 17% of study participants noted they would not exchange their personal information in any of the six scenarios -- and only 4% would.

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