What is westin's definition of a "fundamentalist" in the context of privacy concerns?
Answers
When it comes to feelings about privacy, we are not all the same. In our work on this topic with privacy expert, Dr. Alan Westin, president and publisher, Privacy & American Business, we find three very different groups. Some people feel very strongly about privacy matters. They tend to feel that they have lost a lot of their privacy and are strongly resistant to any further erosion of it. We call them privacy fundamentalists, and they are currently about a quarter (26%) of all adults. At the other extreme there are people who have no real concerns about privacy and who have far less anxiety about how other people and organizations are using information about them. We call them privacy unconcerned and they are about ten percent of all adults. The third, and by far the largest group, now almost two-thirds of all adults (64%) are what we call privacy pragmatists, who have strong feelings about privacy and are very concerned to protect themselves from the abuse or misuse of their personal information by companies or government agencies. However, they are – to a far greater degree than the privacy fundamentalists – often willing to allow people to have access to, and to use, their personal information where they understand the reasons for its use, where they see tangible benefits for so doing and when they believe care is taken to prevent the misuse of this information. Since 1999 the numbers in each segment have varied somewhat.