Poll: More are protecting privacy online

CHICAGO -- Whether it's pruning friends lists, removing unwanted comments or restricting access to their profiles, Americans are getting more privacy-savvy on social networks, a new report found.

The report released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people are managing their privacy settings and their online reputation more actively than they did two years earlier. For example, 44 percent of respondents said in 2011 that they deleted comments from their profile on a social networking site. Only 36 percent said the same thing in 2009.

The report came a day after the Obama administration called for stronger privacy protections for people who use the Internet, mobile devices and other technologies with increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking them. Pew's findings suggest that people not only care about their privacy online but that, given the tools, they will also try to manage it.

For example, "profile pruning" is on the rise, Pew reports. Nearly two-thirds of people on social networks said last year that they had deleted friends, up from 56 percent in 2009.

Among other findings:

Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles. Pew found that 67 percent of women set their profiles so that only their "friends" could see it, compared with 48 percent of men.

People with the highest levels of education reported having the most difficulty figuring out their privacy settings.

Younger people were just as likely to use privacy controls as older people. Sixty-two percent of teens and 58 percent of adults restricted access to their profiles to friends only.

Pew's phone survey of 2,277 adults was conducted in April and May 2011. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The teen data came from a separate Pew phone survey.