Privacy-tards

This may be a cynical PR story, but to my mind it's a great one.

A major ISP, the identity of which I have absolutely no intention of revealing, has carried out a survey showing that while 84 per cent of internet users in the UK claim to be guarded about their privacy, 90 per cent of the same users are prepared to hand over their private data to any Tom, Dick or Harry on the interweb.

This doesn't surprise me at all. In my experience, it's those incapable of distinguishing between genuine and imagined privacy threats who bleat loudest about supposed online privacy violations.

This is more or less the conclusion of the ISP conducting the research: "...[it seems that] the more that people understood about the risks of online privacy violations, the less concerned they were about them," says the release.

For example, they found that 84 per cent of all respondents (and there were over 1,000) said they would not give away income details online, yet also found that 89% of the those surveyed were willing to do exactly that.

“Our research identified a significant gap between what people say and what they do when it comes to protecting sensitive information online,” was the rather obvious quote written by a faceless PR for the ISP's chief privacy officer.

I rather admire the brazen way in which they carried out this survey. They asked lots of questions about attitudes to privacy, before asking them personal questions such as income. More than 87 per cent of respondents who said they guarded their income details actually gave them away in the second part of the survey.

This is hypocrisy born out of stupidity. I would not be at all surprised if some of the respondents to this survey were the same self-righteous, self-important and self-appointed "privacy campaigners" who whine about Google Street View but are incapable of seeing the true threats to citizens' privacy in the modern age.