I've long argued that many people have a contradictory attitude towards personal privacy: what they say about it, when asked, is very much at a variance with what many of them obviously do. Despite polls that consistently show people to be concerned about online privacy, many services that essentially depend on diminished privacy – from Gmail to Facebook to social networks that map your location – are booming. When the choice is paying money versus giving up a little information, people overwhelmingly do the latter. And when was the last time you deleted your cookies?

Politicians, of course, pay attention to polls, which explains why American congressmen are concerned about online privacy. The House Energy and Commerce committee recently extracted an admission from some internet companies that they were indeed using peoples' personal information for advertising targeting purposes, without asking permission.

I certainly support the idea that companies should be accountable to their own privacy policies, but surely this was an administrative oversight. All the companies in question had to do was include some fine print in a routine customer notification; it's not like people would have opted out in substantial numbers even if they had been aware.

The future of internet advertising – a subject in which I have no small professional interest – depends on behavioural targeting and other technologies that are on some level an invasion of privacy. Advertisers want to know who you are, where you go, what you buy, and who you know, so they might better understand what they can sell you. Most people think this is just fine, though frankly if they understood the depth and reach of some of these techniques it might make them think twice.

Clearly people should able to choose whether or not to participate in what we might call the anti-privacy economy; if Congress wants to make a law about that in particular it shouldn't be a very big deal. But more extensive regulation of what internet companies can and cannot do with the massive amounts of data they collect is likely to create more problems than it solves. It's hard to believe that Congress will figure out how to strike the tricky balance between reasonable privacy protection and crippling restrictions on data-gathering and retention.

We may be approaching a point at which people really will start caring about their privacy. How many people even realise that their web surfing habits are being archived, that the ads they are seeing are based on where they are sitting, that their house is findable on Google Earth? I played golf this weekend at a course I hadn’t played before and I asked somebody about the rules for where the carts could drive. Don't worry, he said, the GPS-based course map will bark at you if you stray. Is that the kind of surveillance society we want?

Moreover, information that's useful to advertisers – how much money I make, what kind of vacations I like – is often pretty innocuous. But what about truly personal information such as health records, or gene maps? As the quantity and quality of such information grows, more people are sure to care how it is handled.

But privacy is all about trade-offs. Guarding it makes life less convenient, and more dangerous. If your choice is giving the airline information about yourself, or agreeing to a rigorous personal body search, which are you going to choose? And which is really the bigger invasion of privacy anyway? If surveillance cameras will reduce the chance of your being robbed, does that melt away the uncomfortable feelings?

People growing up in the Facebook generation, moreover, have far fewer privacy expectations. When Facebook introduced its Beacon service, which notified people when their "friends" visited certain websites and bought things, there was enough of a fuss that the company backed off. But what's interesting is that the company conceived and implemented the service in the first place without even realising that it might alienate some people.

The internet industry would serve itself well by staying ahead of the privacy issue, and enforcing some basic good practices, like legitimate notifications. People are far more likely to be offended because they feel duped than because they're concerned about tracking of their surfing habits. Behavioural targeting, in the end, will be the least or our privacy worries.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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