Pew Internet has published the results of a wonderful survey on American’s attitudes about privacy on-line. Here are some great nuggets:

Among the 64% of adults who use social networking sites, we find that … 70% say that they are at least somewhat concerned about the government accessing some of the information they share on those sites without their knowledge…

Similarly, 80% … say that they are at least somewhat concerned about third parties such as advertisers or businesses accessing some of the information they share on those sites without their knowledge; … In contrast to many other questions in the survey, there were only minor variations by age, education, or household income.

Fully 91% of adults “agree” or “strongly agree” that “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.”

91 percent!! Unfortunately the survey didn’t ask “and are you okay with that?”

Generally, people with higher education and/or higher income are more concerned. This is not surprising — and good news for those of us who work on privacy-protecting products.

And few people agree that on-line-services are more efficient (“better”) because they have access to personal data.

Here’s a great table categorizing which information is considered sensitive:

And finally, here are the tables with the detailed results.

Thanks, Pew Internet! This is really useful.