14 DAY TRIAL // A recent survey reveals a really strange situation – people trust the NSA more than they do Google. Considering the revelations over the past year and a half, this comes as a surprise.
“While the federal government and your significant other may have very different interests in scouring your personal data, the potential privacy breach is troublesome in both cases. With data security and government surveillance perpetually in the news, we at Survata decided to gauge public concern about data snooping in various forms,” the blog post displaying the results starts off.
2,500 respondents were polled with two surveys, one gauging concern with the NSA and a corporation like Google gaining access to their personal data, and a second one with bosses, significant others, and parents.
Asked how upset they’d be if a company like Google gained access to all personal electronic data, like web history, downloads, cell phone data, and so on, people gave it a ranking of 7.39 out of ten, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest.
Considering just how many people use Google products, ranging from the search engine to Maps, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and so on, products where people sign over their data in order to get access to them, it’s all a bit surprising.
On the other hand, ask the same question, but replace Google with “NSA,” and people only gave a score of 7.06. This is an intelligence agency that works to collect everyone’s data without caring whether the individual has done anything wrong or if they’re innocent, choosing to have the entire haystack to look for a piece of the needle rather than base their snooping activity on actual evidence.
The irony of these results
The fact that people fear Google more than the NSA is troubling because, when it comes to Google, you actually give your consent for the data to be gathered for both your benefit, since it offers better results and suggestions, and the company’s benefit, since it makes money via advertising. The same can be said about Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, and other huge corporations.
Yet, the NSA, who does all this with no good reason, is less spooky for people. The results shouldn’t really be surprising, since another poll done last year revealed that a majority of American citizens thought there was nothing wrong with the NSA tracking their cell phone records, with 45 percent saying that the NSA should do this and more. The end justifies the means, it seems.
The study further reveals that people would be annoyed with their bosses getting access to their data, giving them a 6.85 score. Parents snooping in on them got a 5.93 score, while their spouse and significant other going through their online history would only moderately irk people – 4.55 score.