Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability:
An Initial Survey

An initial snapshot, based on an online survey of weblog authors, of bloggers' subjective sense of privacy, and of their perceptions of liability, is presented, suggesting that the social norms of bloggers are emergent and self-imposed.

Abstract

This article presents an initial snapshot, based on an online survey of weblog authors, of bloggers' subjective sense of privacy, and of their perceptions of liability. The findings suggest that the social norms of bloggers are emergent and self-imposed. When confronted with questions of defamation and legal liability, respondents in the survey expressed contradictions between their actions and their knowledge of how the technology works. They generally believed that they were liable for what they published online, although they were not concerned about the persistence of their entries. In general, bloggers do not feel as if they know their audiences. For the most part, blog authors have no control over who accesses their entries, and this inability to define their audiences leads them to make a number of assumptions about who their readers are.