A new survey released on Monday shows how much Americans value their privacy on the internet. Seventy-one percent of the nearly 3,000 American adults surveyed said that privacy was very important to them. Privacy protection was seen as the most important concern by many, but Internet security, also known as cybersecurity, was the most important issue by far, to nearly all respondents.
Among the first step to protecting privacy on the internet, the respondents of the National Research Group survey said, is for Internet service providers (ISPs) to be required to notify users when their private data is exposed to the public. This “online protection bill of rights” would include penalties for companies, which would then have to publish a quarterly report on how they are responding to these breaches.
Among the other recommendations to protect privacy on the internet, the respondents believed that it should be illegal for companies to share a user’s browser history, app usage or other digital profile without that person’s consent. The respondents also voiced concerns about storing customer information outside the United States. It was not surprising that this came up after news broke of the deep learning — an artificial intelligence — program called DeepFace that had recently been downloaded 60 million times in China.