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> Eighty-two percent believe their personal information is still being analyzed by the US government, and 81 percent believe their personal information is being

> Eighty-two percent believe their personal information is still being analyzed by the US government, and 81 percent believe their personal information is being analyzed by corporations for business purposes. I can't wrap my head around the other 20%, esp. in the latter statistic. What do they think the world looks like?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
That 20% is likely made up from people who don't understand technology and it's capabilities (think older people who don't use computers - the kind of abilities talked about in the press must sound impossible to them) and people who were brought up to respect authority or think any questioning of government is anti-American socialism.
- hmsimha 12y ago
  The data goes in, the data comes out -- you can't explain that!
seren 12y ago
The wording mentions especially "their personal information". If you live without using much any internet site or service, no facebook, no twitter, etc, no smartphone either, you don't have anything to spy on. I don't know US statistics, but it seems possible that 10 to 20% of the population is living pretty much offline. So they can feel "safe". However, they are still using a phone and pretty much all their call metadata are recorded at least...
- cottonseed 12y ago
  This makes sense. According to Wikipedia [1], in 2012 81% of Americans were Internet users. I would have expected it to be higher. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#Access_and_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#...
- webmaven 12y ago
  You don't have anything to spy on, except your magazine subscriptions, credit card purchases, phone records, public library records, etc.
gone35 12y ago
Well; even among HN commenters, you routinely see an astonishingly naïve, civics-class knee-jerk tendency to outright ridicule any suggestion of extra-legality, duplicity or wrongdoing on the part of security agencies as tinfoil blather[1]. You would have thought people's priors would have changed in light of what we know today, but that would discount the enduring effect of some deeply-rooted notions about trust, benignness and law prevalent in many well-meaning circles in the US. So maybe this is part of that. [1] See for instance the recent discussion on TrueCrypt, with some commenters refusing to believe any agency would force the developers to install a backdoor, due to the ostensible lack of any known explicit legal precedent or authority in the public domain, etc.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

That 20% is likely made up from people who don't understand technology and it's capabilities (think older people who don't use computers - the kind of abilities talked about in the press must sound impossible to them) and people who were brought up to respect authority or think any questioning of government is anti-American socialism.

hmsimha 12y ago
The data goes in, the data comes out -- you can't explain that!

seren 12y ago

The wording mentions especially "their personal information". If you live without using much any internet site or service, no facebook, no twitter, etc, no smartphone either, you don't have anything to spy on. I don't know US statistics, but it seems possible that 10 to 20% of the population is living pretty much offline. So they can feel "safe". However, they are still using a phone and pretty much all their call metadata are recorded at least...

cottonseed 12y ago
This makes sense. According to Wikipedia [1], in 2012 81% of Americans were Internet users. I would have expected it to be higher. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#Access_and_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#...
webmaven 12y ago
You don't have anything to spy on, except your magazine subscriptions, credit card purchases, phone records, public library records, etc.

gone35 12y ago

Well; even among HN commenters, you routinely see an astonishingly naïve, civics-class knee-jerk tendency to outright ridicule any suggestion of extra-legality, duplicity or wrongdoing on the part of security agencies as tinfoil blather[1]. You would have thought people's priors would have changed in light of what we know today, but that would discount the enduring effect of some deeply-rooted notions about trust, benignness and law prevalent in many well-meaning circles in the US. So maybe this is part of that. [1] See for instance the recent discussion on TrueCrypt, with some commenters refusing to believe any agency would force the developers to install a backdoor, due to the ostensible lack of any known explicit legal precedent or authority in the public domain, etc.