The Social Origins of Views on Privacy

Understanding the nature of public opinion about privacy and the collection and use of information by corporate and government agencies was dependent primarily upon the secondary analysis of a large number of surveys made public by the Harris Data Center. An additional and somewhat different perspective on related concerns was developed through the analysis of data from an original large telephone survey administered through an AT&T contractor, Maritz Marketing. A number of key questions were asked in both sets of surveys, but comparisons between 1978 and 1990 surveys allowed for the comparisons of the ways in which key responses changed over time. Among the more interesting were the changes in the levels of trustworthiness associated with particular actors at the time. The Census Bureau became more trustworthy, while telephone companies became considerably less so. Another comparison assessed the extent to which respondents were seeking to have a regulatory response applied to a particular area of activity. The secondary analysis of Harris data from 1978 made it possible to explore the social characteristics that were predictive of respondents’ orientations toward particular aspects of the panoptic sort. The variations of trust toward different institutional actors as a function of respondent age were quite substantial, and often curvilinear, with younger and older respondents often agreeing more with each other. Secondary analysis of data from 1989 surveys examined the relations between trust, and age, social class, and a variety of differences in experience. While those socioeconomic factors had considerable explanatory power, it was also clear that mass media exposure was playing an important role in shaping those opinions.