Another Depressing Study on What Consumers Don’t Know

For the study, titled “Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline,” 1,500 adult U.S. Internet users were asked true-or-false questions about topics such as website privacy policies. The survey was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and released last month.

Respondents generally failed the test, answering an average of seven out of 17 questions correctly.

This study’s been out a couple of months but bears mentioning. Two out of three respondents couldn’t name a single credit reporting agency from whom they could receive a credit report. 71 percent didn’t know it was legal for an offline store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day. And on and on.

See the details of the survey here (pdf file)