Internet users appear to take the concept of privacy online seriously, but their actions don't follow their words very well. AOL surveyed a thousand online consumers in the UK in order to get a feel for their understanding of privacy issues on the Internet and found that while 84 percent said that they would remain tight-lipped about personal details, even more ended up forking them over without any hesitation.

"Our research identified a significant gap between what people say and what they do when it comes to protecting sensitive information online," AOL Chief Privacy Officer Jules Polonetsky said in a statement. That gap was to the tune of 89 percent, which is the fraction of those surveyed who ended up divulging personal income details - "without any pressure or persuasion," says AOL.

Here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, we imagine an amusing scenario where AOL placed the two questions immediately after one another: "1) Would you ever tell someone your income online? 2) What is your annual household income?" Hey, no one ever said Internet users weren't easily distracted by shiny things.

Additionally, AOL found that the more people understood about the risks involved in sharing personal details online, the lower their levels of concern were. This is likely related to beefed up confidence levels - the more people think they know about a topic, the more they think they are awesomely invincible compared to the rest of the population. Earlier this year, security software maker AVG published similar findings when it came to online security. Men tended to be exceptionally confident of their knowledge about security online and their levels of protection compared to women, but AVG found that a third of all users - both men and women - had suffered some form of identity theft.

Not only that, researchers from MIT and Harvard found last year that online banking customers largely ignore most common security cues. Users were happy to log into their bank accounts online even when two-factor authentication systems were nowhere to be found. Part of the test group was even specifically instructed to "behave securely" during the research, but they showed the least secure behavior of all, signaling that banking customers appear to be still rather susceptible to phishing scams, even when educated about how to spot them.

AOL said that its findings would be used as part of the company's privacy education campaign that "features an animated penguin to explain behaviourally targeted advertising for surfers of the Web." (Sounds uh, fascinating.) Through this very basic educational approach, AOL hopes to provide consumers with information about how they can control their online experience, learn about online advertising practices, and opt-out of certain marketing features. "[B]usiness and government will need to offer approaches that recognize that at certain times personalization and data use will be welcomed, and in other cases, users will demand limits on the use of their data," Polonetsky said.