Despite Facebook Inc.’s attempts to become more transparent about what it does with its users’ data, it seems most Americans remain clueless.

That’s the takeaway from a survey that the Pew Research Center published Wednesday. Some 963 adults from the U.S. with Facebook accounts between Sept. 4 and Oct. 1 of last year were asked a number of questions, and perhaps the most startling finding is that 75 percent of those people had no idea Facebook shares their interests and traits with advertisers so they can be targeted.

A further 50 percent said they were not keen on Facebook having an “Ad Preferences” page dedicated to them. They said they did not feel comfortable with Facebook collecting this information and summarizing their preferences.

It seems half of the American Facebook users were completely unaware of how Facebook works as a business, and perhaps haven’t heard the internet-era adage “If it’s free, you’re the product.” Nearly 60 percent of participants said that at least the preferences were more or less accurate, while 27 percent said they did not represent reality.

The survey also wanted to see how accurate users thought Facebook was when it comes to their political leanings and racial and ethnic affinities. “In both cases, more Facebook users say the site’s categorization of them is accurate than say it is inaccurate,” wrote Pew. “At the same time, the findings show that portions of users think Facebook’s listings for them are not on the mark.”

Once three-quarters of users got over the shock that Facebook has been trying to work out what they want, 73 percent of them said the company got their political “affinity” correct. Nonetheless, only 51 percent of people in the survey said Facebook had given them a political affinity.

Some users were also surprised to see they had been given a “multicultural affinity.” This is Facebook attempting to understand users’ racial or ethnic group to target them for ads more accurately. Only 21 percent of users said they had been given this tag by Facebook, while 57 percent of those people said their racial and ethnic profile was accurate.

But if the survey showed that many Americans appear to be naive about how much they’re profiled, in another survey conducted by Pew last year it was revealed that “generally” Americans admit that “it would be relatively easy for the platforms they use to determine key traits about them based on the data they have amassed about their behaviors.”

Image: Helen Cook/Flickr