Blogs, more formally known as weblogs, have captivated the media and, by extension, the public’s imagination. The number of blog writers and readers has grown consistently in the last few years.1 Moreover, blogs are permeating most niches of social life, addressing a range of topics from scholarly and political issues (Glenn, 2003) to family and children’s daily lives (Turnbull, 2004). As blog writers become increasingly prolific, however, they are likely to encounter issues of privacy and liability. For example, accounts of bloggers hurting friends’ feelings or losing their jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent (Bray, 2004; Nussbaum, 2004; O’Shea, 2003; Pax, 2003; Phillips, 2003; Sarnataro, 2003; St. John, 2003; Whitworth, 2003).
Because blogging has the power to affect not only the lives of bloggers themselves but also of the people, companies, and products that are “blogged,” it is important to understand how accountability and privacy expectations function in this emergent arena. This article reports on the results of a survey of blog authors’ subjective sense of privacy and their perceptions of liability as regards the content of their weblogs. Its primary goal is to introduce privacy concerns into the ongoing academic discussion of blogging practices. An additional goal is to describe bloggers’ current expectations as regards privacy and liability for purposes of comparison with future phases of blogging activity.
The findings of this survey suggest that self-imposed social norms are emerging among weblog authors. For instance, bloggers are beginning to create informal guidelines for publishing the names of people and companies in their blog entries. For the most part, however, authors have no way of knowing who their readers are—a situation that has serious implications for both privacy and accountability. At the time of this study, most blog hosting services—with the exception of LiveJournal, which is discussed in the survey—did not provide authors with mechanisms for articulating distinct audiences for different entries. A significant portion of problems reported by the participants in the survey stems from lack of control over who has access to their writings.
The next section of this article provides background information on privacy issues in relation to blogging. The following sections explain the methodology used in the online survey and describe the results from the study. A discussion section follows, where the results are interpreted in light of the existing literature on blogging practices. Finally, the concluding remarks summarize the major findings and point to the need for further work in this area.
Was an interesting article, thank you..
I hope you will keep updating your content constantly as you have one dedicated reader here.
very good information you write it very clean. I’m very lucky to get this information from
you.
These are great articles, I really appriciate your work.
I saw this really great post today….