How consumers let down their guard on web privacy

There's a piece in the NYT by Somini Sengupta on how we are increasingly turning over our data online "in exchange for a deal we can't refuse." The story profiles Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who studies how online users make these choices. "In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently." [NYT]