Facebook as the exception

The report coincides with a national reckoning on privacy in the United States.

In the wake of recent revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling service, harvested the personal details of up to 87 million Facebook users, many lawmakers have started publicly questioning widespread online data-mining by tech companies.

While Republicans and Democrats are divided about surveillance, there was one situation that elicited strikingly similar responses among participants, no matter their political party: Facebook showing users ads based on interests they expressed on their Facebook accounts.

Although the Annenberg School study was conducted before the data-mining scandal erupted, nearly half of respondents overall said they felt angry over the Facebook ad-targeting example. Among them, 48 percent of Democrats felt mad about Facebook tracking, along with 47 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans.

Those results suggest that if members of Congress hope to make consumer privacy legislation a bipartisan issue, Facebook could be their likeliest common ground. In recent weeks, several senators introduced bills focused on Facebook and other online providers. It is too soon to tell whether they will gain traction.

The survey asked participants about different hypothetical situations, like the one involving Facebook. Another one involved landlords subscribing to databases that profiled the past behavior of potential tenants. And one involved government agencies tracking where people who received food stamps bought their groceries.

Interviewers asked survey participants how they felt about each example, directing them to choose between paired responses like “happy” or “sad,” “safe” or “threatened,” “unbothered” or “creeped out.”

In the survey, Republicans often said they felt “unbothered” by surveillance practices and even “pleased.”

One question, for instance, described police officers using surveillance techniques to closely monitor “people who they think have characteristics that are common among criminals.” Among survey respondents, 62 percent of Republicans said they felt “happy” about the police example, compared with 45 percent of independents and just 31 percent of Democrats.

The Annenberg study is not the first survey on Americans’ responses to snooping.

A study published last fall by researchers at the Data & Society Research Institute in Manhattan found that a variety of factors, including income and political affiliation, correlated with respondents’ attitudes on privacy. (Turow was an adviser on the Data & Society study.)

“We saw that in general Democrats have a higher concern across an array of scenarios about the use of their data,” said Mary Madden, a researcher who leads an initiative on privacy in low socioeconomic status populations at Data & Society. “Republicans are in general less concerned about those practices.”

Turow said the survey