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TECHNOLOGY

Sharing Data, but Not Happily

By NATASHA SINGER

JUNE 4, 2015

Should consumers be able to control how companies collect and use their personal
data?
At a dinner honoring privacy advocates this week in Washington, Timothy D.
Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave a speech in which he endorsed this simple
idea. Yet his argument leveled a direct challenge to the premise behind much of the
Internet industry the proposition that people blithely cede their digital bread
crumbs to companies in exchange for free or reduced-priced services subsidized by
advertising.
You might like these so-called free services, Mr. Cook said during the event
held by EPIC, a nonprofit research center. But we dont think theyre worth having
your email or your search history or now even your family photos data-mined and
sold off for God knows what advertising purpose.
Now a study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University
of Pennsylvania has come to a similar conclusion: Many Americans do not think
the trade-off of their data for personalized services, giveaways or discounts is a fair
deal either. The findings are likely to fuel the debate among tech executives and
federal regulators over whether companies should give consumers more control
over the information collected about them.
In the survey, which is scheduled to be made public on Friday, 55 percent of
respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that its O.K. if a store where I shop
uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the
services they provide for me.
About seven in 10 people also disagreed that it was fair for a store to monitor
their online activities in exchange for free Wi-Fi while at the store. And 91 percent

of respondents disagreed that it was fair for companies to collect information about
them without their knowledge in exchange for a discount.
Companies are saying that people give up their data because they understand
they are getting something for those data, said Joseph Turow, a professor at
Penns Annenberg School for Communication and the lead author of the study.
But what is really going on is a sense of resignation. Americans feel that they have
no control over what companies do with their information or how they collect it.
The report on consumers attitudes to commercial surveillance comes at a
pivotal moment for online marketers and advertisers. Companies are scrambling to
develop new techniques to influence people who increasingly use mobile devices to
shop, bank and socialize. Yet, even as millions of people embrace these data-driven
services, many are mistrustful of the kinds of inferences that companies might
make based on information gathered about them.
Some marketing companies, for instance, segment individuals into clusters
like low-income elders or small town, shallow pockets or categorize them by
waistband size.
The potential risk of inferior treatment is one reason that an increasing
number of Internet users are downloading Ghostery, a free plug-in that allows
consumers to see and control online tracking by data brokers, advertising networks
and other third parties.
Consumers will share information with sites they trust because they want to
get personalized ads and content, said Scott Meyer, Ghosterys chief executive. But
they will turn off the tracking technology if they are looking up painkillers for their
mother because they dont want the Internet to think they are addicted to opiates.
The conflicted feelings are hardly a new phenomenon. An article published 15
years ago in InformationWeek carried the headline: Privacy Paradox: Consumers
Want Control and Coupons.
But the Penn survey concluded that many people are now resigned to having
little say over how companies use and interpret their information.
Among people who took part in the survey, 84 percent strongly or somewhat
agreed that they wanted to have control over what marketers could learn about
them; at the same time, 65 percent agreed that they had come to accept that they
had little control over it. The randomized telephone survey of 1,506 adult American
Internet users, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International
in February and March, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percent.

Although he did not take the survey, Jeff Allen, a manager at a school
yearbook company in the Atlanta area, is one of the reconciled.
Mr. Allen said he regularly used Uber, the ride-hailing app, on business trips,
fully cognizant that the services drivers needed to know his whereabouts to pick
him up.
Yet he said he was troubled last week after he learned that Uber was updating
its privacy policy to explicitly allow the company to record the location of
customers devices even when they were not actively using the app.
I think its none of their business where I am up until the moment when I
elect to use their service, Mr. Allen said. Nevertheless, he said he planned to
continue using Uber, at least for the moment, because he found it more convenient
than taxis.
Data is being collected on you all the time, Mr. Allen observed. You either
dont have a clue about it, or youre resigned to the fact that this is the way it is in
2015.
Companies that are more transparent about why they collect certain customer
details and how they use them may find it easier to maintain customer trust.
Certainly, millions of people have signed up for store loyalty cards and frequentflier programs that offer deals or upgrades based on consumers purchases. And for
the many people who relish personalized services, the idea that Amazon, Facebook,
Google Maps or Pandora may remember and learn from their preferences
represents an advantage, not a problem.
People are always willing to trade privacy and information when they see the
direct value of sharing that information, said Mike Zaneis, the chief counsel for
the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group in Washington.
But the Penn researchers found that many consumers may not fully
comprehend the data-mining practices that occur when they use sites and apps.
For instance, 58 percent of survey respondents wrongly believed that when a
website had a privacy policy, it meant that the site would not share their
information without their permission.
The more concrete situations the survey described, the more likely people were
to reject deals. For instance, 43 percent of respondents said they would accept a
discount if the supermarket where they shopped kept detailed records of their
purchases. But only 19 percent said they would accept discounts if the supermarket
could use their purchasing history to make assumptions about their race or

ethnicity.
Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester Research, describes consumers
experience with sophisticated data-mining systems as frog-in-the-caldron
syndrome.
You start off by putting the frog in tepid water, Ms. Khatibloo said, and then
you raise the temperature so the frog doesnt realize its cooking.
Like Mr. Cook of Apple, she contends that companies that offer consumers
more control over and insight into how their information is used may differentiate
themselves from their competitors.
But many companies behave more like Uber.
The companys new privacy policy, scheduled to take effect on July 15, says
that if customers permit the Uber app to connect to location data, the app may
collect the precise locations of their devices whether the app is running in the
foreground or the background. Whether or not customers turn on that permission,
the app still may deduce their general location based on other signals from their
devices.
And, if consumers use the ride-hailing app on or after that date, the company
will conclude that they have read and agreed to the terms, Uber said in a recent
email to customers.
In other words, Uber customers may resign themselves to having their data
extracted or forgo the service altogether.
A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Sharing Data, but Not Happily.

2015 The New York Times Company