October 30th, 2008
World Map of Flickr Privacy Settings
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(Cross posted on my fellowship blog)
TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb have written about a slide shared by Yahoo!’s Principal Research Scientist Elizabeth Churchill on geographical locations where Flickr users are more likely to post their photos with privacy settings (red) or use the default public setting (green). The sample set was 1 million Flickr users who self-reported their locations, in 2005.
Neither Michael Arrington nor Marshall Kirkpatrick share any details of the methodology behind the map, but a quick Google search led me to the presentation from which this slide seems to be taken: ‘Sharing Preferences and Privacy Cultures‘. The presentation itself is based on a paper by Elizabeth Churchill and Shyong K. Lam titled ‘The Social Web: Global Village or Private Cliques?’ The paper is behind a firewall but the presentation gives some more data about the research —
- More than 90% of users younger than 25 post their photos as public. In the 25 to 40 age group, public photo sharing behavior drops, almost in s straight line, to 80% and goes as low as 70% for users in their late 50s and early 60s.
- Public photo sharing behavior follows a S curve when mapped against the number of contacts: it first decreases between 0 to 10 contacts, then increases with the number of contacts to go beyond 90% for more than 30 odd contacts.
- In the world map itself, there are at least five gradations from green to red. It seems that pure red means that about 70% of the users share their photos publicly whereas green means that about 90% of the users share their photos publicly. Since no information is available for the methodology behind the world map, I can only conclude that users in America, Brazil and Russia have a higher tendency to share their photos publicly than users in India, China or Europe.
The conclusion that Indians are more concerned about online privacy than Brazilians and Americans further complicates my research on attitudes towards online privacy in BRIC countries. Another research by Synovate showed that Brazilians and Americans are more concerned about online privacy than Indians, whereas my own understanding is that both Brazilians and Indians are much less concerned about online privacy than Americans.
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A lot of Indians posts their photo albums on picasa
.I know 90% of users of many trekking groups post their albums on picasa. Also a lot Flickr users from india love to send out individual photo sharing invitations via email to their close friends.
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I would tend to agree that Indians a lot less concerned about online privacy than Americans. Especially with photography. When I started with my own website and showcased my digital artwork, photographs, painting etc., I did not even have a copyright statement / all rights reserved on my website / blog. In fact, in the earlier days, the line read “Copy but give credit”. In the last six months, I've had readers “inform” me that because I don't have a all rights reserved statement, my stuff was likely to be copied MORE - I don't think so though - in my experience, people will still copy. Might as well put it out there in public. Although I've now added a “All rights reserved” to my blog . Confusing at best.
Specifically about privacy, my Facebook page is open to “Everyone” and not just friends or friends of friends. Everyone can see my photographs, my videos and most of the details on my profile. Even a silly 12secodn video on 12second.tv is visible to everyone. Many of my American [ online ] friends would NEVER make their profile visible and a client even got defensive when I got back to her with a detailed assessment of her and her company's requirements - she was all over the web and I picked out the details. She wrote back saying how “unsafe” it was that everything was available online these days.
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@DellTechie: Yes, it will be interesting to look at the popularity of Flickr in various countries in 2005. The relatively lower public photo sharing behavior of Indians might be linked to the lower number of contacts Indians had on Flickr in 2005.
@Naina: Your comment has reminded me that I don't have a copyright notice on my own blog.
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