Only a tiny fraction of Canadians who flock to social networking sites actually trust the operators to keep their personal information private and secure, a government-sponsored survey has found.

The newly released results found that only six per cent trust the sites, compared with 79 per cent of Canadians who don't trust them at all. Fifteen per cent said they were neutral on the question.

Along with an overwhelming lack of trust in social networking sites, the survey, commissioned by Natural Resources Canada to gauge the public mood about privacy and geospacial information, also found a very tepid response to street-view images of private homes, such as Google Street View.

When asked if these images should be allowed in Canada, only 26 per cent agreed compared to 36 per cent who said they should not be allowed; 36 per cent were neutral on the subject.

Meanwhile, a strong majority -- 74 per cent -- think it's important for the federal government to regulate images of private residences appearing on Internet mapping tools.

The online survey of 2,200 Canadians was administered last fall, just before the Canadian launch of Google Street View with a company commitment to blur all faces that were captured in the images.

The survey was also completed after Facebook announced new safeguards to protect the privacy of users in response to demands from Canada's privacy commissioner.

"What I think this shows is that people aren't really buying the assurances that privacy sector companies are giving them and taking them with a grain of salt," said Avner Levin.

The director of the privacy and cyber crime institute at Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto cited media reports of hacked celebrity Twitter accounts and Facebook scams.

"People see that and say, 'Sure they're reassuring me that my information will be safe and secure, but I don't have a sense from reading the news,'" said Levin.

However, Levin said the disconnect between people's attitudes and their behaviour offers some good news for site operators and online businesses.

Since 2008, comScore, Inc., a marketing firm specializing in measuring the digital world, has named Canada as the No. 1 nation in the world in social networking adoption.

Google Canada, meanwhile, reported that global traffic doubled on the day the company launched Street View in Canada last October; and before the launch, Canadians viewed more than 150 million street view images in other countries in the first nine months of 2009.

"What we see with personal information, is a lot people are concerned about their personal information and how it's protected, but it doesn't translate into some kind of action, like, 'I'm going to stop using this particular website or this online service,' " said Levin.

Phase 5 Consulting Group Inc., weighted the data from the online poll to reflect national statistics by region, age and gender. It conducted a phone survey of 550 Canadians to validate the online results, with a margin of error of four per cent, 19 times out of 20.