Политика

Creepy or Not? Your Privacy Concerns Likely Reflect Your Politics

A survey from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania asked participants about different hypothetical situations. One asked how they felt about landlords subscribing to databases that profiled the past behavior of potential tenants.

Are you creeped out by the idea of a company checking a job candidate’s credit history before deciding whether to hire her or him?

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Your answer could be tied to your political views.

A new poll on surveillance from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that Americans are deeply divided over tracking, both online and in real life. And political affiliation is a main predictor of Americans’ emotional reactions to surveillance, the researchers found.

Among people who identified themselves as Democrats, for instance, 62 percent said they felt “creeped out” by the idea of companies checking job applicants’ credit history before hiring them. By contrast, half of independents and just 29 percent of Republicans felt creeped out.

“The Republicans are most likely to be positive about surveillance,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study. “The Democrats are most likely to be negative, and independents are always in the middle.”

“It’s just a chasm,” he added.

The study, published on Monday, focused specifically on Americans’ emotional responses to snooping techniques that could disproportionately affect low-income populations. Among other things, the survey asked participants about practices like police profiling and landlords subscribing to profiling databases to screen potential tenants. Professor Turow said the report was the first national study of its kind.

The survey was based on phone interviews conducted in January and February with a nationally representative sample of 1,499 adults in the United States. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Although Republicans, Democrats and independents in the survey had divided emotional reactions on various snooping techniques, the majority of respondents said that the surveillance was expected. Whether Americans like it or not, pervasive tracking is becoming a fact of daily life.