Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Center’s Internet & American Life Project, said with social networking becoming mainstream, there are bound to be missteps by Web sites that will challenge users’ views of privacy online.

In a study to be released by Pew in weeks, the center found that most people said they cared greatly about online privacy but they didn’t do much about it. When asked if a user plugged in their own name into a search engine to see what public information is available on them, the numbers dramatically dropped.

The study will be the first update on user sentiment toward online privacy in three years. But was conducted before Facebook’s high-profile change of privacy settings last December and the launch of Google Buzz last month. And it won’t capture questions about location-based services, as Facebook, Twitter and Google are reported set to announce features that would allow users to track where a person is based on global positioning systems and other location technologies.

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“Part of what you are seeing is that we’ve reached a point where social networking use is mainstream and there is so much more awareness of the idea of centering your life around a profile and that being a representation of yourself,” Madden said in a recent interview.

“With respect to things that have happened recently, there is going to be more outrage or stronger reaction simply as more people get engaged with social media and they have more invested in it. There is more to lose,” she said.