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Study: Online privacy sacrificed for trust

LONDON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- Internet users reveal more personal information online if they believe they can trust the organization requesting the information, British research showed.

"Even people who have previously demonstrated a high level of caution regarding online privacy will accept losses to their privacy if they trust the recipient of their personal information," said Adam Joinson, who led the study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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The findings are important for people creating online services posing privacy threats, such as government agencies developing identification cards, Joinson said. People who said they were unconcerned about privacy would be opposed to ID cards if they thought their privacy was threatened.

The "Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online" project provides "research which actually analyzes what people do online rather than just looking at what they say they do," Joinson said.

Fifty-six percent of Internet users participating in the study said they were concerned about online privacy, Joinson said. The main issue was whether Web sites were viewed as trustworthy, causing users' behavior to change.

When a Web site is designed to look trustworthy, people are willing to accept privacy violations, he said. The same actions by an untrustworthy site lead to more guarded behavior.

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