The report found that 86 percent of respondents did not want political ads tailored to their interests and that 61 percent did not want similarly tailored ads for products and services.

When asked how the use of tailored ads might affect their decision to vote for a certain candidate, respondents reacted most strongly to tailored ads in social media, suggesting that using Facebook’s sponsored stories for political candidates could potentially backfire.

According to the survey, more than 70 percent of respondents said the likelihood that they’d vote for a candidate they support would decrease if they learned that the candidate used Facebook to send ads to the friends of a person who “likes” the candidate’s Facebook page. (Fifty percent said the likelihood would decrease “a lot”; 22 percent said it would decrease “somewhat.”) That compares to 64 percent of Americans who said the likelihood of voting for a candidate they support would decrease if they learned the candidate’s campaign bought information about their online activities, as well as their neighbors’ web activities, to send them different political messages.

Eighty-five percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they would be angry if they discovered that Facebook was surfacing ads for political candidates based on information they thought they had made private.

Using some level of personal information to target voters isn’t new, but online tools have given political campaigns the ability to target with even more granularity, by zip codes, mobile devices, social behavior, interests and more. Television advertising still dwarfs digital advertising, but media research firm Borrell Associates estimates that political campaigns will spend $160 million on online messaging in the 2012 election season, up from $22.2 million in 2008.

Joseph Turow, professor at the Annenberg School who led the study, said he surveyed consumers’ opinions on targeted advertising in a 2009 study and saw similar results. Then, as now, more than 60 percent of consumers said they didn’t want to be shown ads tailored to their interests, although in 2009, the percentage was 66 percent versus 61 percent in this year’s survey.

“It shows that things haven’t really changed, people are still reacting to the idea of tailored ads,” he said. “They know it goes on, they can’t do anything about it. But that doesn’t mean that they like it or think it isn’t wrong.”

The consumer response to tailored ads in politics is particularly strong, he proposed, because people want to feel like they’re a part of the larger society and don’t want advertisers shaping their political perspectives for them.

A survey released earlier this month by Bizrate Insights claimed that most online shoppers feel neutral or positive about online behavioral retargeting (in which ads are targeted based on the websites a consumer has visited online), and that one in four online buyers actually say they “like” retargeting. But that survey only queried a pool of consumers who opted into the online survey after making a purchase and aren’t necessarily representative of all Web users.

The Annenberg study was conducted via telephone by Princeton Survey Research Associates and included more than 1,500 English and Spanish speaking adult Internet users in the U.S.

(Image by Augusto Cabral via Shutterstock.)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• A near-term outlook for big data
• How consumer media will change in 2013

But Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, is proving that there’s a large market for location-based information provided by a company that’s serious about online privacy. The company will announce Tuesday that it’s partnering with National Night Out to prevent neighborhood violence as it grows and signs up users across the United States, creating an interesting model for startup success.

The idea behind Nextdoor, which GigaOM wrote about at the company’s October launch, is that you use Facebook to connect with friends and relatives, Twitter for news and information and LinkedIn for career information.  But the company thinks there is room for a social network devoted solely to where you live.

“When I bought a house and got married and had children, all of the sudden the neighborhood is the nucleus around which you’re building your life,” said co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia.

Nextdoor allows users to join a network dedicated to their specific neighborhood and fill out a profile to connect with neighbors in that same network. Neighbors can create profiles with the names of their family members, information about pets and interests, and photos of their house. They can message each other asking for babysitters, post about household items up for sale, crowd-source issues with public utilities or ask about lost dogs.

Part of what’s especially intriguing about Nextdoor is its exclusivity and commitment to online privacy. With most apps you hear about, it’s easy enough to go online, enter some information about yourself, and get started on the network in seconds. Not so with Nextdoor.

My neighborhood doesn’t have an established Nextdoor community, and if I wanted to start one, I’d need to find nine neighbors and have them all verify their addresses within 21 days. Otherwise, no Nextdoor for me. And to verify those addresses? My neighbors would need to either accept a call from Nextdoor to their a landline phones, verify their local address with a credit card, or have a paper postcard mailed to their address. You can’t exactly sign up in seconds.

“It’s definitely the tortoise versus the hare approach,” Tolia said.

But for a company that’s aggregating incredibly personal information, like the names and faces of your children and photos of where you live, an obsession with privacy and instance on verified information is understandable, and something you could see users appreciating.

“In the short term, it’s very painful,” Tolia said. “But in the long-term, it has been a very powerful platform.”

The slow sign-up process also addresses one of the biggest doubts at Nextdoor’s launch, which was whether people would use it.

So far, the approach seems to be working, with people creating Nextdoor communities in 48 states and 2,800 neighborhoods across the country. The company refused to provide any details about registered or active users, however, saying only that at the moment, around 20 new Nextdoor websites go live each day.

What’s the future for a clever startup that isn’t monetizing its service right now? Certainly partnerships with local governments and intitatives like National Night Out seem like a good fit, and position the company as a good neighbor-type service. But beyond that, there seems like incredible potential for making money off the localized personal data that the company collects. Tolia said he absolutely will not open the service up to political advertising, even though that would seem like a lucrative  and obvious partnership, because of the potentially polarizing affect. But Tolia said the inclusion of Yelp and Twitter-like promoted ads for local businesses is a definite possibility.

So it’s worth keeping Nextdoor on your radar — assuming you can find nine neighbors to help you check it out.

This story was updated Tuesday in two spots to clarify the sign-up process for Nextdoor.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications