Shop the Web, sign on to Gmail or one of Google's mobile apps, or do almost anything else online, and you probably realize you're losing some privacy - if only because experts such as the University of Pennsylvania's Joseph Turow have been telling you so for years.
You may also have heard that you're simply engaging in a rational trade-off: You get things, such as free services or discounts, in exchange for giving up data about yourself - maybe even details you consider sensitive, such as where you travel or what you buy at a drugstore.
Turow, a media and marketing scholar at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, had heard that trade-off theory, too, but never fully bought it - in part because of evidence he has amassed showing that people don't understand what marketers and supportive policymakers claim they willingly accept. Now he's gone a long way toward disproving the theory with a new study called "The Tradeoff Fallacy."
Its key conclusion: Most people don't freely accept that trade-off as fair - including many who understand much of what's at stake. Instead, they're resigned to it because they feel powerless to do anything else.
Turow has a broad interest in how much people know about and accept what he calls the "astoundingly transformational" role of the Internet.
As he sees it, "predictive analytics" - what others call Big Data - are simultaneously changing the media, politics, and the marketplace. One key effect: The Internet you see often diverges from the Internet I see, because of what businesses, marketers, and anyone else who trades in personal data know - or think they know - about us.
His latest study focuses on the commercial sphere, where data about the "customer journey to purchase" shows how you investigate products and where you shop - even at bricks-and-mortar stores, which can now also track your presence through smartphone data.
Much of how businesses use our data remains a black box even to experts such as Turow. If you could peer inside, you might question some aspects of the bargain it obscures.
We know, for instance, that some people get special discounts, because companies like to portray personalization as a key benefit of behaviorally targeted marketing. But we mostly have to infer that the converse is also true: that some consumers pay a premium because companies have data showing they're "sticky" - not likely to shop elsewhere - or otherwise price-insensitive.
Or perhaps just undesirable in some other way. One of Turow's concerns is that variable online pricing is reversing the democratization of commerce that department stores and supermarkets delivered to earlier generations through fixed and open pricing, taking us back to when merchants chose what to show different customers and how much to charge each.
Do consumers really accept all this with open arms?
"Marketers always say that people are against stuff, but that if you give them any kind of coupon, they'll sell their mother," Turow says. "They're getting the right kind of information from Google, they're getting sociability from Facebook, they're getting all these things in the supermarket for using the loyalty card."
But that's not what he and two co-authors concluded after a random survey of 1,506 consumers.
Many remain ignorant of key aspects of data use. For instance, nearly two-thirds mistakenly believe that if a company has a "privacy policy," that means it won't share your information without permission. Large percentages also don't know that it's legal for a pharmacy to sell data on their over-the-counter drug purchases, or that no rules bar variable pricing online or off.
Even so, many consumers worry. More than 70 percent disagreed with the statement, "What companies know about me from my behavior online cannot hurt me."
The researchers reached their key conclusions from patterns in responses to a series of such statements.
More than 8 in 10 people agreed with "I want to have control over what marketers can learn about me online." But elsewhere in the questioning, nearly two-thirds agreed with, "I've come to accept that I have little control over what marketers can learn about me online."
The overlap - people who agreed with both statements - showed that nearly 6 in 10 didn't like the trade-off but were resigned to accepting it, the researchers concluded.
And 43 percent agreed with all three statements - "they're resigned and have this dark view," as Turow puts it.
He's not sure what to do about these findings, but he knows one thing: The sale and analysis of vast amounts of personal data are already having profound effects on modern society. And the rest of us need to know far more about what's inside that black box, so we can decide what to accept or reject.
215-854-2776@jeffgelles