Blog Survey: 
Expectations of Privacy and Accountability
Fernanda Viégas , 2004

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS


A comprehensive paper describing the results from this survey has been published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and is available HERE



Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public’s imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one’s life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends’ feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent. 

Here we report the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online:

- the great majority of bloggers identify themselves on their sites: 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name (first name only, first name and initial of surname, a pseudonym friends would know, etc.)

- 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way

- 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs

- 34% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in trouble with family and friends

- 12% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in legal or professional problems because of things they wrote on their blogs

- when blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally.

- 83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings whereas 20% said they mostly publish lists of useful/interesting links (respondents could check multiple options for this answer). This indicates that the nature of blogs might be changing from being mostly lists of links to becoming sites that contain more personal stories and commentaries.

- the frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; (r = 0.3, p < 0.01); generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.

- there is no correlation between how often a blogger writes about highly personal things and how concerned they are about the persistence of their entries

- checking one’s access log files isn’t correlated to how well a blogger feels they know their audience

- despite believing that they are liable for what they publish online (58% of respondents believed they were highly liable), in general, bloggers do not believe people could sue them for what they have written on their blogs.

The findings in this survey suggest that blogging is a world in flux where social norms are starting to flourish. For instance, many bloggers reveal the names of companies and products when they blog about them, except when they write about a company for which they currently work or have worked in the past. More bloggers are becoming sensitive about revealing the full names of friends on postings as well. But for all of the careful publishing guidelines that are starting to evolve, bloggers still do not feel like they know their audience. For the most part, they have no control over who reads their postings. The study also shows that bloggers usually have some idea of their “core” audience (readers who post comments on the site) without really knowing who the rest of their readers are – in many cases, this latter group makes up the majority of their readers.

When confronted with questions of defamation and legal liability, respondents in this survey paint a conflicting picture. In general, they believe that they are liable for what they publish online. However, bloggers in this study were not concerned about the persistent nature of what they publish – which tends to be a major aspect of liability – nor did they believe someone would sue them for things they had written on their blogs. Moreover, 75% of respondents said they have edited the contents of their entries in the past. Even though most respondents explained that they usually edit typos and grammatical errors, 35% of respondents said they had edited for content as well: entries they decided were too personal, entries they thought were “mean”, some respondents mentioned having gone back to entries to obfuscate names of people. These results reveal a certain naiveté in how most bloggers think about persistence and how it operates in networked environments such as the net, where information is constantly cached. As blogs become more pervasive and their audiences grow, the ever-persistent nature of entries and the direct link to defamation and liability are likely to become even more of a burning issue. 

SURVEY CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS

The results presented here are based on an online survey, which ran for seven days (from January 14th to January 21st, 2004). During that time, 492 people responded to the online questionnaire. Out of those responses, 486 were selected for data analysis – the remaining 6 responses were incomplete and, therefore, were disregarded.

Respondents to this survey were not selected on a random basis. Announcements for the online survey were posted to mailing lists within MIT as well as on a few high-traffic blogs published by people known to the author of this survey. The viral nature of blogs meant that the links to the survey page quickly spread to many other blogs. Nevertheless, this does not qualify as a random sample of the blogger population and, as such, the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world.

STUDY POPULATION

The charts and tables in this section provide an introductory snapshot of the population of respondents in this study. As table 1 indicates, the majority of participants (63%) is male. Even though a few of the popular blogging sites attract mostly teenagers, our respondents tended to be older, with almost half of them (46.3%) having between 21 and 30 years of age [Table 2]. The overwhelming majority of participants (78.6%) were Caucasian [Table 5]. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that the survey questionnaire was available only in English and that announcements for the survey were posted to mailing lists in a couple of American universities, 67% of the respondents reported they lived in the United States [Table 6]. The education level of respondents was quite high: 59% had been to college/university, and an additional 31.1% had attended graduate school [Table 3]. Finally, most participants in this study (67%) have been blogging for over one year, with 36% having blogged for over two years [Table 4].

1. female:           
2. male:             
3. undisclosed:    

36%
63%
1%

1. below 20      
2. 21 - 30
3. 31 - 40 
4. 41 - 50
5. 51 - 60
6. above 61

10.5%
46.3%
28.2%
11.3%
3.1%
0.4%

Table 1: Sex distribution of respondents.

Table 2: Age distribution of participants.

1. elementary school
2. high school
3. college/university
4. masters/professional. degree
5. phd

0.2%
9.7%
59%
26.2%
4.9%

1. < 3 months
2. 3 - 6 months
3. 6 months - 1 year
4. 1 - 2 years
5. > 2 years

6%
9%
18%
31%
36%

Table 3: Education level of participants.

Table 4: Length of time blogging.

1. African
2. African-American
3. Asian
4. Asian-American
5. Australian
6. Caucasian
7. Latino/Hispanic
8. Native American
9. Pacific Islander
10. Other 

0.4%
1.0%
4.1%
3.3%
1.4%
78.6%
2.1%
0.6%
0.4%
7.8%

Table 5: Ethnicity of respondents.

Live in the United States		Live outside the United States
Alabama	1	Australia	10
Arizona	2	Austria	1
Arkansas	1	Bangladesh	1
California	56	Belgium	1
Colorado	5	Bulgaria	1
Connecticut	2	Canada	23
D.C.	3	Denmark	2
Florida	6	England	38
Georgia	8	Estonia	2
Idaho	2	Finland	1
Illinois	13	France	4
Indiana	4	Germany	1
Iowa	1	India	4
Kansas	3	Indonesia	1
Kentucky	2	Iran	1
Maine	1	Ireland	4
Maryland	5	Israel	1
Massachusetts	40	Italy	4
Michigan	3	Japan	10
Minnesota	5	Malaysia	1
Missouri	5	Netherlands	1
Montana	1	New Zealand	2
Nevada	1	Norway	1
New Hampshire	3	Pakistan	1
New Jersey	4	Portugal	7
New Mexico	3	Romania	1
New York	27	Scotland	3
North Carolina	8	Singapore	2
Ohio	4	South Africa	2
Oregon	14	South Korea	1
Pennsylvania	12	Spain	6
Rhode Island	1	Sweden	2
South Carolina	2	Switzerland	3
Tennessee	7	Thailand	1
Texas	15	Tunisia	1
Utah	2	Venezuela	1
Virginia	6	Wales	2
Washington	18
West Virginia	1
Wisconsin	6
U.S. (in general)	23
U.S. total	326	Non-U.S. total	148
Undisclosed location	12

Table 6: Current place of residency of respondents.

If you would like more information about the results from this survey or about how the survey was conducted, contact Fernanda Viégas at blog-survey@media.mit.edu