Almost a third of Americans questioned about their internet habits say they have taken action to shield their online information from the government since national security whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed almost two years ago that ordinary citizens were unwittingly under mass surveillance, according to a new report.
Many people have switched back to the quaint practice of talking face to face rather than risk being spied on while using their phone or going online, a survey by the Pew Research Center found.
Others have cut down on their use of social media or have avoided or uninstalled certain applications and avoided using certain words when they communicate online, Monday’s report showed.
Almost nine out of 10 people surveyed had heard about the government surveillance programs to monitor phone use and internet use that caused uproar in the US and around the world when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed their existence to the Guardian in 2013, resulting in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles.
The new Pew survey asking Americans for their views on cyber-privacy now reveals that the US public is “still coming to terms” with how they feel about the surveillance programs and “how to live in light of them”.
Snowden’s revelations became known far and wide. Only 6% of those Pew questioned for its report had heard nothing about the programs, and almost a third had heard a lot about them.
Since learning about the surveillance programs, 34% “have taken at least one step to hide or shield their information from the government”, the Pew report, called Americans’ privacy strategies post-Snowden, said.
Specifically, 17% changed their privacy settings on social media and 15% actually cut down on their use of social media altogether. People became more wary of the apps on their computers or mobile devices, with 15% avoiding certain apps and 13% going so far as to uninstall apps. And 14% said they started communicating more often with conversations in person, rather than on the phone or over the internet.
Among the most shocking revelations from Snowden were that the government secretly had broad access to ordinary citizens’ phone records – though not the content of the actual calls – without any kind of court order, and dozens of intelligence programs were created to collect the public’s data from some of America’s largest technology companies.
Since Snowden leaked thousands of files of information about the programs to the public via the Guardian, a quarter of those asked by Pew researchers said they had altered their online habits “a great deal” or “somewhat”, especially changing the way they use email, search engines and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and using more complex passwords.
But more than half said they considered it would be difficult to find tools and strategies that would give them more security online and on the phone.
As the revelations about the government’s covert surveillance strategy continued to be exposed in the media in the months after Snowden first sat in a secret hotel room on the run in Hong Kong and talked about them, 61% of survey respondents said they have become less confident the programs are serving the public interest.
Those tending to support the Republican party were more likely than Democrats to say they were now less confident that the surveillance of US citizens served the public interest.
However, a majority of the public supporting both sides of the political aisle believe it is acceptable to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists, American leaders, foreign leaders and foreign citizens – and US citizens who use words such as ‘explosives’ and ‘automatic weapons’ in their online searches.
