Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better.

I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc, but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.

This sounds harsh, I know, but the data supports it. At the moment, much of that data comes from the US, but I don’t think things are all that different over here. Some of the most reliable information about people’s online behaviour comes from the Pew internet and American life project, which conducts regular polling about Americans’ use of the internet. Last Wednesday, the project published the findings of a survey on public perceptions of privacy and security in the post-Edward Snowden era. And what the researchers found makes sobering reading.

The findings were neatly summarised by the New York Times as “Americans say they want privacy, but act as if they don’t”. Or to put it less succinctly: “Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.”

The Pew survey finds that distrust of online and phone communications has increased in the wake of Snowden’s revelations. Eighty one per cent of respondents do not feel secure using social media to share private information. More than two-thirds of them feel the same way about online chats, 59% about text messaging, 57% about email and 46% about talking on cellphones. Even landlines are suspect, with 31% of respondents feeling uneasy about them too.

Survey respondents said that they were equally suspicious of their government and of the big internet companies. Yet more than half of them declared their willingness to “share” information about themselves with the companies in return for so-called “free” services and more than a third accept that these services are more “efficient” as a result of being able to exploit that personal information.

Eighty per cent of those who use social networking sites say that they are “concerned” about advertisers and other third parties accessing the data they share on these networks. In fact, across the board, there seems to be a widespread lack of confidence among adults that online communication channels are secure and there’s not a single electronic channel that a majority of American users regard as “very secure” when sharing personal information with another person or an organisation.

Overall, therefore, what comes across from the survey is that the vast majority of Americans regard online and phone channels as at best somewhat insecure. Yet these same people continue to use those channels. This suggests that most internet users suffer what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”, ie, “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change”.

So we have a mystery: why do we continue to use communication channels that we don’t trust? The conventional answer is our old friend Tina (There Is No Alternative). In some areas, we are trapped by the power of network effects – the force that convinces people that nowadays they must be on Facebook even if they don’t really like it. Tales of, for example, teenagers who are bullied because they don’t use Facebook don’t exactly encourage independence. In other areas, for example, webmail services provided by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, people use them because they are unwilling to pay for email services.

And although technology exists for protecting privacy, for example, by encrypting one’s email, most people don’t use it because it’s too difficult to implement; because, when push comes to shove, their privacy isn’t as important to them as they say it is.

In that sense, could it be that what we’re getting is not the internet we say we want, but the internet we deserve? Technology holds up a mirror to human nature and what we see in it are, well, useful hypocrites.