This picture was presented by Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo at a meeting I am attending today. It shows the privacy settings of a sample of a million Flickr users from 2005. Red spots note users who have photo sharing turned off (private), green shows users who have photo sharing turned on (public).
The results are fascinating. The US is widely public except for users who seem to be hovering around Utah, and varies by state. Europe, by contrast, is largely private, and more so as you move north. The Middle East is wide open. South East Asia is mixed. India is private.
I wonder why the west coast of the US is so sparse – most of my similar mappings show a lot of Flickr users there, as in this example:
http://www.kraz...sunrise-sunset/
Wow! Very interesting facts – I wonder if this has to do with user perceptions of how bad it is to share their photos or if it has more to do with the type of content they are uploading (perhaps more personal?)
I’d love to correlate these statistics with those of other social networking websites to come up with some conclusions on privacy-related web usage in different parts of the globe.
Was it on CIKM 2008?
eastern europe china and russia one is very opened the other closed. i expected both to be closed.
Utah might be more private because there are lots of families with young children there, and people sharing family/kids photos are much less likely to share with the whole world. I suspect this has probably changed (given it’s 2005 data), depending on rates of adoption and age groups adopting the platform.
I’d like to know how the sample was gathered. It seems odd that eastern US has *so* many more Flickr users than the west coast. Makes me wonder if the sample is flawed…
I think the map shows states in the US and countries elsewhere.
How else would the only UK Flickr users be in Scotland (and none in London)?
3 US states at the Pacific?
There has been a lot of discussion, at least in Sweden, concerning privacy on the net. Especially since the government OK’d a law to allow the Swedish equivalent of NSA to get full access to all cable-based communication. I believe people are more privacy-minded after that.
@ Lateef – please let us know if you do! We are currently investigating user privacy concerns, and would love to hear how the people feel about sharing their private data in public.
It is interesting to see the change in trends from public to private, as users want to increasingly control their privacy despite supposed control that a lot of networks don’t really provide.
Shuen (Web 2.0 A Strategy Guide), discusses the public setting as default leading to positive network effects. This is an interesting and critical strategy that will surely need to be reconsidered, especially in the light of a privacy debate that seems to have barely begun?
I also find my ‘European ‘ friends on Facebook tend to use more security settings. Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Is this the best quality screenshot we can get?
It would be mad funny if you can place your Google AdSense code in the flickr pics and make money from yahoo…lol
Hey Mike:
Is Archimedes Ventures still in play? Word on the streets is YES.
Tell us of your involvement in this VC firm.
Por favor, mi amigo gordo.
Interesting. I wonder if this information carries over to other social networks like Twitter.
Interesting. I would have thought that the U.S. would be more private. I guess we are voyeurs at heart.
updated with a better version of the slide.
Wait a second, the dots don’t represent the same number of people. The marker in Nunavut Canada prolly just represents the pictures of 2 users. Hardy big enough sample size to represent the population (of 50 humans and 25 polar bears). The size of each dot should vary with the number of people it represents.
Not surprising. Europeans generally go out to be with company, stay home to be alone. North Americans go out to be alone, stay home with company or go online to be social. Pattern is somewhat reflected in Flickr privacy preferences.
it looks like there is one symbol for each country and U.S. state, its not based on user/population density. They aren’t centered very well on their region, but you can see that there is a pattern. maybe that was a lot harder to see on the old slide…
This just notes how large the disparity around the world really is…
i.e. the lack of flickr users in africa and southeast asia compared to the us and europe
Peter Epstein
http://www.thewebwar.com
does anyone know why northern Europe is red?
Here’s the presentation from which this slide seems to be taken: Sharing Preferences and Privacy Cultures by Elizabeth Churchill. It gives some more data, but still doesn’t say much about the methodology for arriving at the slide.
hm.. I live in the northern Europe and have many friends here..
#geoperdis put is very well: “Europeans generally go out to be with company, stay home to be alone. North Americans go out to be alone, stay home with company or go online to be social”
That is so much true. If I go out with my friends, we take pictures, then we share them among us. Why would we share them to outside people? Similarly, my private-life pictures I’d only like to share with people I know/like/want to..
Honestly, I have always been suprised why Americans like to show (off with?) their private life so much..
So maybe instead of wondring why northern Europe is “so private”, we should wonder why America is “so public”?
cheers
So interesting..
To clarify some confusion: It seems there is one “pin” for each country of the world + each state in the US. It has nothing to do with the number of users per location.
um, why doesn’t Yahoo’s world have New Zealand?
For those interested in finer-grained correlations between Flickr privacy decisions and location, correlations between privacy decisions and tags, or people’s (including parents’) considerations in choosing privacy settings, check out another paper (PDF) from Yahoo! Research.
Dean
disclosure: I’m one of the authors, but do very much think y’all might find this relevant.
For some reason, full disclosure only includes capital investments not personal relationships. It is like that every where. If you make your investments based on the information on this blog, then you are stupid and you deserve the losses you incurred.