pew

The battle between privacy and security has reared its head again with the news that the National Security Agency gained access to the phone records of U.S. citizens. But a majority of people polled think this practice is reasonable.

Among 1,005 Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, 56 percent said they believe that tracking phone records is an "acceptable way" to investigate terrorists. Taking the opposite view, 41 percent consider the practice unacceptable, while 2 percent weren't sure.

Drilling further, 62 percent believe it's important for the government to … Read more

One out of every three people in the U.S. is a tablet owner now, with the prevalence of the devices nearly doubling in the last year, a report from the Pew Internet Project says.

The study, released Monday, found 34 percent of U.S. adults now own a tablet, up from about 18 percent who owned one a year earlier.

Tablet owners tend to be older and more well-heeled than demographics for other consumer electronics. The majority of tablet owners, or 56 percent of respondents, are people living in households earning at least $75,000 a year. Nearly half, … Read more

While debate rages over whether Android devices, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Windows Phones are better, there's no question that people increasingly prefer smartphones to feature phones.

And the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project just released the numbers to back that up.

In the U.S., 56 percent of adults are now smartphone owners, according to a study published Wednesday by Pew. This is the first time since Pew began tracking the numbers that the majority of the population owns a smartphone.

Currently 91 percent of people in the U.S. own a cell phone and 35 … Read more

When your hormones are harassing you to within an eyebrow-width of your sanity, all you want is a simple life.

You want to be able to curl up with the kind of social network that understands you and doesn't give you headaches.

That kind of social network is, increasingly, not Facebook.

At least this is what teens seem to have told the Pew Research Center during its latest study.

Indeed, the teens surveyed were disturbed by the increased presence of adults and the increased tendency of other teens to angst-ridden self-expression on Mark Zuckerberg's site.

There is, as … Read more

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has mostly good news about how teens approach privacy issues on social-networking services.

While "teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past," according to the study, "few teens embrace a fully public approach to social media," but "take an array of steps to restrict and prune their profiles." Here's the full report.

The study also found that:

The old stereotype that teens love using telephones still holds true even in the digital age.

Now, though, instead of landlines, almost all teenagers use cell phones. And, according to a new Pew Research Center report (PDF) released today, more and more U.S. adolescents own smartphones. Pew's survey looked at technology use in 802 teens from the ages 12 to 17 in July and September of 2012.

Seventy-eight percent of American teens owned a cell phone in 2012 and nearly half of that group had a smartphone. This means that overall 37 percent of all teenagers had a … Read more

More people are reading e-books, and more of them are using tablets as their primary way of doing so.

The percentage of Americans who now read e-books rose to 23 percent in 2012 from 16 percent a year ago, says a report out today from Pew Internet. Over the same time, the percentage of those who read printed books dropped to 67 percent from 72 percent.

From the poll conducted in October and November, the percentage of people who own a tablet or dedicated e-reader jumped to 33 percent from just 18 percent a year ago.

But among the two … Read more

Maybe today's youth aren't as different as older generations when it comes to tech.

A new report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looks at how different people use their smartphones and tablets to consume news. It finds that younger users are just as likely to get news on those gadgets as older folks.

"While they are much lighter news consumers generally and have largely abandoned the print news product, young people get news on mobile devices to similar degrees as older users," the report reads. "And, when getting news through … Read more

People are now using their cell phones for much more than talking. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 85 percent of U.S. adults own a mobile phone and 56 percent of them use it to get online.

"Fully 85 percent of American adults own a cell phone and now use the devices to do much more than make phone calls," Pew's Maeve Duggan and Lee Rainie wrote in the recently released study. "Cell phones have become a portal for an ever-growing list of activities."

The data is … Read more