In 1999, several employees of AT&T conducted a study to determine what concerns the average internet user has about online security. See the full report and research methodologies. For our purposes, we'll focus in on one key result: what did those surveyed identify as key factors in their decisions to give out personal information to a website?
As the graphic below (taken from the AT&T Bell Labs report) indicates, people were categorized from the sum total of their survey responses either as "marginally concerned", "pragmatic majority", or "privacy fundamentalists". Using the pragmatic majority as an index, we can see what users consider important when deciding whether to submit information to a website:
82% consider the site's information-sharing statistics the most important factor in data submission, a finding that supports the idea that users do not want their personal information distributed, sold, or otherwise disseminated among other parties.
The significantly lower percentages concerned with the site's published privacy policy or its privacy "seal of approval" from a third-party site (50% and 39%, respectively) suggest that people are less likely to take into account the word of the site itself or even a trusted external site to assure them of the site's security. People appear more concerned with where the information is going and what exactly is being collected than with the claims the site makes about its use of the information.
This survey again suggests that the online world needs some standard of privacy protection and data collection protocol-something to raise the individual user's comfort level in regards to the transmission of personal information. However, this comfort level should not be a false one; legislation and individual websites should make privacy protection a priority.