As more people move more of their lives onto the Internet, Westin explained, longstanding boundaries between the groups have shifted. Until the 1990s, he said, those in the unconcerned group made up about 20 percent of the population, and privacy fundamentalists stood at about 25 percent; the pragmatists occupied the middle 55 percent. But a recent poll by Westin showed that the group of unconcerned Americans had shrunk by nearly half, to just 12 percent of the population; the people who shifted, in general, joined the ranks of the pragmatists: not radicalized, but more wary than before.
The largest segment of the population wants to have the ability to make privacy choices, said Harrison M. Rainie, who heads the Pew project. He said that surveys by Pew and others found that consumers "do not want to vest rule-making power in other entities" like government. At the same time, they "feel very comfortable" with government's taking "aggressive enforcement" measures when companies violate their rights, Rainie said, especially when it comes to abuse of financial information and health data.
Collaborative filtering
Many companies are also exploring ways to serve customers without collecting personal information. Moviephone, for example, provides the names of theaters and show times based solely on the caller's ZIP code. And at the Web site for Palm Inc, software from a company called Net Perceptions helps the company make recommendations on Palm gear based on a technology known as collaborative filtering: predicting what a visitor might want based on what other visitors choose, said Nicole Rynee Barnes, the e-business manager for the company.
Privacy is a moving target, and notions about it continue to evolve, said Stewart A. Baker, a lawyer in Washington and a consultant on high-technology issues. The initial horror about cookies has undergone a metamorphosis into a more nuanced attitude. "There's always something we consider private and it's something we can keep private," he said. "Those things that we can't keep private we develop a callus over.
"We're going through one of those transitions now," Baker continued, "but faster."
What Americans might really want, said Michigan's attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, is a sense of privacy that is not absolute, but that reassures them. Granholm, who has mounted aggressive investigations of companies accused of violating consumers' privacy, said that the notion of privacy "can be misconstrued as the right to be left alone."
"What we want is to create a safe place for people to do business and research," she said.
Granholm said that her thinking had evolved over time, and credits much of the shift to conversations with James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who served on a Federal Trade Commission advisory committee on online privacy and security. Like her, Tierney said that he had initially been alarmed by the warnings of privacy advocates about the dangers of cookies and intrusion. But, he said, he had come to realize that this was not a nation of Greta Garbos and Theodore Kaczynskis.
"Privacy is not about being left alone," Tierney said; citizens should be able to feel that the personal data that they entrust to others is protected. "It's about safety."
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