Cool Memories

“When you have privacy, you value it more,” said Mr. Acquisti. “But when the starting point is that we feel we don’t have privacy, we value privacy far less.”

So Mr. Acquisti says those experts who say people don’t care about privacy are off-base. Instead, he said, the perception that people place little value on privacy is shaped by their low expectations, which Mr. Acquisti termed the “continual psychological conditioning that we don’t have privacy, that our personal information is widely available and we can’t control that.”