The recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project on "Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency" presents some interesting statistics and analysis regarding people’s awareness and use of digital information about themselves and others on the Internet (their "digital footprints"). The most interesting result, to me, was the revelation that "60% of Internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online."
The Pew study groups U.S. adult Internet users (which I will refer to as "Internet users" from this point on, to simplify exposition and reduce redundancy) into four categories, with respect to their privacy perceptions and actions:
- Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online adults. They say they do not worry about the availability of their online data, and actively upload content, but still take steps to limit their personal information. Young adults are most likely to fall into this group.
- The Concerned and Careful fret about the personal information available about them online and take steps to proactively limit their own online data. One in five online adults (21%) fall into this category.
- Despite being anxious about how much information is available about them, members of the Worried by the Wayside group do not actively limit their online information. This group contains 18% of online adults.
- The Unfazed and Inactive group is the largest of the four groups—43% of online adults fall into this category. They neither worry about their personal information nor take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online.
This large number of people being unconcerned (not worrying) about privacy – the 60% of Internet users who are "confident creatives" or "unfazed and inactive" – contrasts sharply with previous reports on privacy concerns. One of the things that is interesting about the Pew survey is that it distinguishes between perceptions and actions – who is worried about privacy, and who is actually doing something about it. It’s also interesting to note that 54% of the people who say they are worried about how much information is available about them have not taken any steps to limit the amount of information available about them … reminding me of people who complain about politicians but don’t vote in elections (which I estimate to be at least 36%, based on recent U.S. census figures about voting).
These differences between perceptions and actions with respect to privacy been conflated in earlier studies. For example, a 2003 Harris poll conducted by Dr. Alan Westin used a different three-tier categorization, and was based on sampling all Americans, not just Internet users, and asked about privacy in general, not just online privacy (though both distinctions are eroding over time, e.g., Pew estimates that 71% of the U.S. adult population is now online, i.e., use the Internet, and I suspect most people who are concerned about privacy are most concerned about online, vs. offline, information … though today’s recent Wall Street Journal report on IRS employees "browsing" through tax returns raises some privacy concerns for me):
- Privacy Fundamentalists: Some people feel very strongly about privacy matters. They tend to feel that they have lost a lot of their privacy and are strongly resistant to any further erosion of it (26% of the American public)
- Privacy Unconcerned: At the other extreme there are people who have no real concerns about privacy and who have far less anxiety about how other people and organizations are using information about them (10% of the American public)
- Privacy Pragmatists: who have strong feelings about privacy and are very concerned to protect themselves from the abuse or misuse of their personal information by companies or government agencies (64% of the American public)
There are a number of issues that have been raised about the methodology, labels and conclusions of this poll – Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Lorrie Faith Cranor provide an in-depth survey of privacy polls conducted for Harris by Dr. Alan Westin – who, interestingly, does not appear to have a homepage – over the past 30 years, including this one (which appears to be the most recent) – but it does suggest very different perceptions (if not actions) with respect to privacy.
I’m not sure how much of the appearance of fewer concerns about privacy reflects actual changes in perceptions or changes in sampling methodologies (or analysis), but it suggests to me that many concerns about privacy concerns have been overstated. And personally, I feel a little less like an outlier now that I’ve moved from a tiny minority (one of the 10% of privacy unconcerned) to a slightly larger minority (one of the 17% of creative confidents).
In addition to labeling four quadrants of privacy perceptions and actions, the report also distinguishes between an active and passive digital footprints:
- a passive digital footprint is personal data made accessible online with no deliberate intervention from an individual
- an active digital footprint is personal data made accessible online through deliberate posting or sharing of information by the user
There are, of course, some grey areas, e.g., data made available through unanticipated effects of privacy policy changes in online social networking services, but I think this distinction offers useful handles for categorizing participation on the web.
There were a number of other interesting findings in the report:
- 47% of Internet users have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.
This may be a significant increase, but I’m still surprised at such a low number, which may be primarily (or entirely) a symptom of my standard assumption that most people are like me in most respects. [FWIW, googling Joe McCarthy turns up this blog (Gumption) in the #9 spot … with 8 of the other 9 entries on page 1 being references to my much more famous (IRL) namesakes, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin whose un-American activities on the ironically named House Committee on Un-American Activities (taking authoritarian actions in the name of anti-communism) gave us the term "McCarthyism", and the other page 1 "hit" a link to the former Hall of Fame baseball player and manager.] - 11% of Internet users have a job that requires them to self-promote or market their name online.
Now, I’m not sure how "requires" means, especially in the age of The Brand You (first articulated over 10 years ago!), but this, too, seems like a surprisingly low number. FWIW, the report also defines public personae as "adult Internet users who have jobs that require self-presentation or self-marketing online" … a label that strikes me as considerably more arbitrary than the others (e.g., would someone who has a prominent public digital representation of self that is not strictly required by one’s job be excluded from this class? I would consider myself in this class, since a large number of my colleagues at Nokia Research Center have no personal or professional web pages (that I’m aware of). Am I a "public personae"?). - 68% of public personae have searched for information about themselves online.
Some quick math suggests that 32% of public personae are therefore not being accountable for some portion of their job descriptions. - 25% of public personae have created an SNS profile.
What?! This may be yet another symptom of the small sample (and/or large assumption) issue noted above, but it much more often the case that I find a LinkedIn profile for someone I can find no other information about than I find other information about someone who does not have a LinkedIn profile. I would consider LinkedIn to be the training wheels for public personae (though increasingly, as I noted with respect to a straw poll conducted at the most recent Nokia Mobile Mashup, Facebook seems to be the new business networking weapon of choice) - 35% of Internet users believe their home address is available online.
So 65% of Internet users are either not aware of WhitePages.com, Anywho reverse lookup, and similar services, or have taken steps to ensure their home address is not available online. I would be inclined the former category is larger than the latter category. - 73% of Internet users say their company or employer maintains a web site.
So 27% of Internet users are either unemployed or work for a company that does not have a web site. It would have been helpful to know what proportion of this group are employed. The most recently updated Pew chart of Internet Demographics shows 32% of U.S. adults age 65+ (retirement and post-retirement age) use the Internet, but it’s not clear what proportion of Internet users are in this demographic. I imagine that nearly every employer in the U.S. has a web site by this time. - 33% of Internet users have posted some kind of creative content online; 22% have shared something online that they personally created.
So this means that 11% have only posted creative content that others have created? I know YouTube has a large number of videos that represent potential copyright violations, but it seems unlikely that this use case could account for that proportion of users. I know there are professionals who create online content for others, but I would think that most of them have also created their own content (and posted it online).
One of the most interesting and surprising results was who people look for online – or, more precisely, who people don’t look for online. A table on page 24 of the study summarizes who looks for who:
There are several figures in this table that strike me as astoundingly low:
- 19% of all Internet users search for co-workers, professional colleagues or business competitors; 11% of all Internet users search for someone they are thinking about hiring or working with.
Wow! I always search for information about any person I plan to call, contact by email or meet face-to-face with for the first time, and I conduct very thorough searches for anyone I’m thinking about hiring or working with. It’s hard to imagine that the vast majority of people have never done this. - 12% of all Internet users search for someone they just met or someone they were about to meet for the first time; 9% of all Internet users search for someone they are dating or in a relationship with.
First of all, I’m a little confused about meeting someone vs. thinking about hiring or working with someone … if the former subsumes the latter, then only 1% of Internet users search for someone they are thinking about meeting for personal (vs. professional) reasons. Given the immense popularity of online dating services – most of which include search functionality – I find this number to be the most surprising in the entire survey. Even if 12% of the population of adult Internet users is searching for information about prospective dates, this still seems low, given that 60% of U.S. males and 57% of U.S. women are married. Obviously, there are many people in relationships who are not married, but I would still expect that at least 24% of the adult population is "open" to new relationships (and perhaps a considerably higher percentage, if we include adulterers) … which means at most half of them are searching online for information about potential partners. In any case, it’s been a long time since I was not in a primary committed relationship – I’ve been happily married for almost 20 years (I’m not sure what proportion of that time my wife would claim to be happily married) – but if I were to become part of the singles scene today (flying spaghetti monster forbid), I would be even more committed to searching for information about anyone I was going to meet for personal reasons than for professional reasons.
I received yet another email announcement from Pew yesterday notifying me that a new study – an update on Teens and Social Media – has just been released. I wrote about the last Pew study on Teens, Privacy and Online Social Media when I was ranting blogging about the overestimation of risk in teens’ use of MySpace. I look forward to reading – and blogging – about the new study, but will save that for a separate post.
Comments
11 responses to “Unconcerned About Privacy: The Pew Internet Report on Digital Footprints”
I tend to have my reservations about the user’ perceptions and the inferences that can be drawn from such studies. There studies are required, they are healthy and act as indicators, but may not tell the story in “entirety”, there may be related factors, obscurities that may not really give the true picture. It’ always great if things fall on the positive side. Here’ a recent post on Slashdot about a Verizon study – “Most In US Have False Sense of Online Security” And, the slashdot comments do give a nice mix of objectivies & subjectivities.
We all know that web security is still in infancy, none other than Bruce Schneier can validate for the same. Are security and privacy related? I guess so. If there is a false sense of security, privacy is put on the back-burner. All it takes is a couple of nasty experiences and to set worries about privacy, and for most people who do experience negative fallouts ( these may not be material harm but online information can be misused in various ways ), there may not be right forums to address such issures, and does the above study factor in all that’ happening on the web?
Overall, web security and privacy issues have to be debated and the best means found to keep the online experience favorable, rather than wait for more people to run into wrong things that may potentially lead to a whirlpool.
Praveen: thanks for the comments and the links!
I believe security and privacy are related, but I do think they are different. Very private people and very public people can both be (or feel) secure or insecure.
As for negative experiences and fallouts, I’m not aware of any long-term negative consequences with respect to perceptions of privacy (or security) following the AOL search leak, one of the most publicized breaches of online data.
I think that as long as the benefits of online services remain sufficiently compelling, people will generally be willing to share their personal data … even in the face (or aftermath) of such breaches.
FWIW, Paul Dourish, co-author of the tremendously insightful CHI 2003 paper “Unpacking Privacy in a Networked World”, recently visited our lab and gave a talk on “Accountabilities of Presence: Location Tracking Beyond Privacy”, in which he explored the particularities of convicted sex offenders’ use of GPS anklets. One of his main arguments was that privacy is not something we have, but something we do, i.e., it is a practice or process – or perhaps a set of them – not a state … which (I think) is consistent with the Pew study’s distinction between perceptions and actions.
All that said, I agree that none of these studies and analyses tells the whole story, but I do feel we’re getting progressively better approximations of people’s privacy perceptions and practices.
Read through the “Unpacking privacy….” paper, but would add some general comments not necessarily addressing the said research paper.
Surveillance / monitoring are not necessarily bad or wrong percepts. But they imply negative connotations in public parlance, in general, for the exact same reasons that, the nature of actions derived out of such monitoring can be used out-of-context in a different setting and time by a non-neutral entity. “Trust is a percept” that cannot be claimed as being handled in the most trust-worthy way by humans for thousands of years, for various reasons and factors of controllable and uncontrollable nature.
Since we are increasingly in a networked world, and as the social networks provide millions of users, mostly authentic, one of the best ways of generating PEW-like studies would be to incorporate user feedback from the real networked users, what they like and what they don’t and what they expect? But introducing such a metric itself may probably show withdrawal symptoms, now does that qualify as a negative tension?
In the past 5-6 years, the users of online services may not necessarily be aware that much of information submitted to online sites is crawled by Google. However, it appears that there is a certain threshold time of online usage, which if completed without hazards, mostly, gets the users hooked to the service irrespective of other connotations, simply because it is far more convenient.
I think its general consensus that these side-effects contribute more to delays ( the road-blocks most want to avoid ) in adoption, but welcomed and hoped to be conducted in the best possible way by majority of the sane public.
Praveen: thanks for the ongoing discussion about these important issues.
Your comments about conducting privacy studies in the context of a social networking service remind me of some comments and predictions I (and others) made about Facebook’s Social Ads, and some more recent historical and analytical insights and observations made by danah boyd about Facebook’s privacy policy changes over the years, and how those have affected perceptions and actions of Facebook users (unfortunately, the direct link to the post seems to be broken on her blog, but it can be found by searching for / scrolling to her December 11, 2007 post):
I read your blog entry Joe, and came away thinking it was interesting but held little impact upon me here in New Zealand – though I am well aware there are no boundaries in the cyber world. Then I picked up my morning coffee and the Sunday paper only to see the head line, “Net users wake up to the price of indiscretion”,about how many Kiwi’s are employing US based “reputation protection” companies to troll for potential damage to their future job and dating prospects. I laughed aloud which got my wife and I involved in a long conversation about the benefits and detriments of the modern world, which I guess in away you were responsible for initiating. Very cool. Enjoy your writing, photos, and such very much. Happy holidays to you and your family.
Robb
Thanks Joe! for your patient responsive dialogue and answers. I think I need to enlighten and broaden my knowledge about privacy, the past and the future, so that I would be better able to articulate about ‘what it would mean in the coming digital world?’ There maybe some facets that need to be dug up more than others. Indeed, I see clear distinction between privacy and security, although they may affect each other and be interdependent on one another.
Thinking on such issues, Consumer grievance redressal, in general, is a related area, I guess. And “Consumer redressal” itself takes a different meaning when privacy is more like a commodity.
Praveen: it’s always a pleasure to have a constructive dialogue, online or offline. I see this blog as a platform for thinking out loud – gaining clarity by having to write things down. When others comment, my horizons are broadened, and so I thank you (and others) for helping me better understand some of the things I write about!
Robb: thanks for your comment, too. I tracked down the reference to the article you mentioned (“Net users wake up to price of indiscretion”), and read about how, for $9.95/month (New Zealand dollars?), Reputation Defender offers to “undertake detailed internet searches hunting for inappropriate, hurtful or inaccurate information and negotiating its removal if required.” This immediately reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984, where history was being (is? (will be?)) continuously rewritten to reflect the current perspectives of the powers that be. Glad to see this power being made available to the masses … though I do have to wonder how much “defense” to one’s reputation can really be offered by this company.
I hope you and your family have a happy – and reputation stain-free – holiday season, too!
Joe: I could not resist posting the article titled “Questions to Consider in the Coming Privacy Wars” from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick dated Jan 3, 2008 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/questions-about-privacy-wars.php , that is relevant, timely and provokes bold questions ( not answers ) related to PRIVACY. It hits upon ‘Privacy & Data openness’, ‘Privacy & Innovation’, ‘Privacy & Centralization of data retention’, ‘Digital privacy & national, international security’….
Praveen: thanks for the link! It’s a great article, and the comment stream offers a number of additional insights. Among the highlights for me are the reference to a Wired article on the Privacy International report about global privacy that lists the US in the lowest category – “endemic surveillance societies” – along with Russia, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and UK, and the usability issue that is so often absent from discussions about privacy:
I agree. Those were also the lines that caught my attention too!
Kia ora Joe,
A follow up to this post is I once again sat down with my sunday morning coffee and paper, the Sunday Star Times, to see an article, “Why Facebook is Evil”, printed in relation to another article about a young college grad murdered here by her spurned lover and her open book entreaties on her Facebook page. What that had to do with her being killed I am not sure, but I found the article interesting.
My own experience was getting a Facebook notice from a very good friend, to which to respond I had to create my own Facebook page – which I did. Within a few weeks I was “connected” to a group of people who were my “friends”, all of whom I did actually know and see on a regular basis here in New Zealand. One found me from his new home in Ireland, which was cool, and we have since stayed in touch through more conventional email. I found the quality of those interactions, well, a bit mindless and tedious really. Exchanging “hugs” and “cuddles”, postng my “mood”, ect. And after reading your post here I decided to “deactivate” my account – interestingly the option delete being unavailable. It was an easy choice. Have a great day.
Robb