Flickr: Public vs. Private Around the World, A Map
Guess which US state has Flickr users most likely to post their photos with privacy restrictions turned on? Utah. Think you can guess relative emphasis put on privacy by Flickr users in South America vs. South East Asia? How about Hawaii vs. Alaska? (That one might surprise you!)
I'm here at a small meeting of the Yahoo Product Advisory Council and while most of what's being discussed today has been put under Non Disclosure Agreement, the presentation by the Yahoo! Research Team can be blogged about and includes at least one really interesting visual about Flickr privacy levels around the world.
The following map displays locations where users are more likely to post their photos as "public," which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red. The sample set was 1 million Flickr users who self-reported their locations, in 2005, probably just after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. The map was presented by Principal Research Scientist Elizabeth Churchill. I'm sorry it's so blurry but I think it's interesting enough to warrant posting anyway.
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What kind of conclusions do you think one can take from that map?
Posted by: ☂Marcos Marado
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October 29, 2008 2:12 PM
Marcos, I don't know. I'm not sure I'd draw any conclusions based on this but I might incorporate this into some anecdotal thinking along with other data points.
The flickr privacy map sorta looks like the political map of these elections.
Posted by: Stepan Mazurov
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October 29, 2008 3:15 PM
But the difference between USA and Europe is as usual!
In Europe they are 2 years behind...
But as you can see in the closed social networks as Studivz.de ... It starts like in the US myspace years ago: The youth starts making self-marketing...and show every photo to everybody...
Is their a place that I could get better access to the map that you posted? Is there better data that I could get in the pacific northwest and California area? thanks, Michael
Michael, this is all I got - glad you find it interesting though.
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.
Michael, you're wrong. This has nothing to do with the diffusion latency. This is a cultural difference. People of different cultures just think in a different way and they personalize this app so that it fits their needs.
@Michael: You could also say it in a positive way: European users are more aware of privacy issues. Maybe most users elsewhere simply don't bother to change the default setting. Each time I browse other users' photos, I'm surprised to see many pictures that cannot possibly be of interest to the general public. And I bet there are many personal rights violations going on, i.e. depicted people not being asked if they agree that the picture is going to be published on flickr.
(BTW: I'm from "Old Europe" too;-))
it's not just a question of privacy, if you have a pro account you can use flickr to store your pictures, but you might deem most of them not worthwhile for the rest of the world. Or maybe you just don't want to submerge your contacts with an endless flow of semi crappy pics...
It would be more interesting to have an analysis of how many are open to friend/family vs. how many are public, as well as a qualitative study of how those pictures differs.
still i'm not really surprised about Europe. Is there a similar map for creative common vs. all rights reserved?