True preferences are revealed by actions. Thousands of executives say that they would like to spend more time with their families, but they never do, revealing their real preferences when faced with the tradeoff between career and family. Some of them find Amazon's tracking of their purchases unnerving, but not so much that they are willing to go the local bookstore and pay cash instead. A million consumers say that they are annoyed by junk mail. They forget that they learned by perusing the Sak's Fifth Avenue catalog that it is too pricy for them, or how much they saved in time and gas by buying through mail order instead of going through the mall.
Talk is cheap.
Surveys do not reveal customers' real attitudes nearly as well as actions. If concerns about privacy emerge in an ephemeral manner in response to a prompting from a survey, and are never acted upon, they are not worth transforming into regulatory goals. If, by contrast, concerns about privacy do affect consumer behavior, then they will emerge in the market with no need for regulation . But the important question is not whether 4 web sites have privacy policies, or 40, or 400 . To state the blindingly obvious, these systems are voluntary.