Americans are conflicted about World Wide Web privacy. They say they want better protection for their personal details, but often trade away safeguards to connect with friends or find what they are looking for online.

Many experts agree privacy has eroded with the growth of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and the spread of behavioral advertising, where ads are fed to society based on their online behavior. What’s hard to know is how much of that erosion humans are willing to miss for the sake of cyber convenience.

“The huge majority of folks want to protect their privacy,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a Traverse City, Mich., researcher focused on privacy and details protection. “But they aren’t doing anything about it.”

Instead, they increasingly post personal info on online profiles, share documents with strangers and put up with ever-more intrusive ad-targeting methods that monitor their online movements. And they are not

just younger computer users — who are commonly
believed to be less sensitive to privacy concerns — but older adults as well.

A privacy debate was rekindled last year after Google announced its proposed purchase of ad-targeting outfit DoubleClick. New fuel was added in November when Facebook launched its Beacon advertising program — drawing the ire of privacy advocates and eventually a mea culpa by the company, which responded to the storm of protest by letting folks opt out of the program.

Privacy advocates say programs like Beacon, which share knowledge about a person’s purchases with his or her friends on Facebook, give consumers too little control by how much personal knowledge Web companies gather and use.

Similar complaints dog other forms of behavioral targeting, particularly the spread of “third-party” cookies, or little programs that sit on a person’s computer and monitor the sites visited, and share…

Orginal post by Top Tech News