Users may save content (such as a tweet or a photo) because they fear its owner will delete it, because the site itself offers no guarantee of permanence (such as a story in a newsfeed may disappear and be difficult to re-find), or simply because they want to have a copy on hand. In the scenarios we spelled out in the surveys, saving was always motivated so participants would not imagine differing reasons for saving something; for example, guests interviewed on a podcast might want to save copies of the podcast for themselves.

The scenarios distinguished between saving for permanence and saving for reuse; the surveys considered reuse separately and are discussed in the next section. The scenarios also posited that the person was saving content without impediment; no tricks (such as screen captures of a Snapchat session) or special knowledge were necessary. That way, saving would not seem contrary to the media creator’s expectations. In addition to testing the features outlined earlier, the hypotheticals checked two other aspects of saving—saving to cloud storage and explicitly imposed limits on saving.

Cloud storage. Cloud storage is often
portrayed in the popular media and in
user interfaces as a seamless exten-
sion of local storage. Yet it is never
fully under user control, and service-
provider terms and conditions may
apply. From a rights perspective, is
saving downloaded content to local
storage (such as on the person’s hard
drive) different from saving it to private
cloud storage (such as in the person’s
Dropbox folder)?; and

Limits. Responses to hypotheticals in the surveys suggest people expect to be able to download much of what they encounter online. This baseline may be tested by imposing artificial limits. For example, suppose people are permitted to save tweets they authored themselves but not the tweets other users wrote in response?

Our results have confirmed the baseline condition that participants usually felt individuals should be able to save anything they encounter on the Internet to local storage, regardless of whether the content is published on the open web or shared on a social media service, as long as the content is public.

This result was reaffirmed by our
own hypotheticals that tested the idea
of imposing limits on saving; these lim-
its were based on a strong interpreta-
tion of ownership rights. Participants
considered ephemeral (such as an
in-game chat session or other forms
of communication) may influence
perceptions of another user’s right to
save the content, regardless of wheth-
er that user was a participant in the
conversation; and

Disaggregation. Disaggregation tests whether the rights to constituent parts of an item are different from the rights to the whole. This feature has allowed us to test whether, for example, the audio track of a recorded video inherits ownership rights from the video.

Here, we discuss the highlights of our findings, including social norms that emerged across studies and sometimes across actions. We also note media-specific norms and where norms break down.

Saving Social Media

To our participants, saving is the most benign, or least ethically contentious, action the scenarios explored. In the surveys, we define saving as an intentional act of downloading something—a photo, podcast, document, or video—to user-controlled storage to maintain a copy, rather than a side effect of performing some other action (such as viewing a webpage).

Figure 1. Social norms for saving online content.

strongly disagree slightly disagree slightly agree strongly agree agree neutral disagree

0%

1a
.
Tw
it
t
e
r Can save conversations to hard disk
Can only save own side

1 b.Fac e boo k

Can save own profile and friendlist

Can save friends’ friendlists

1c
.
Vi
d
e o Can save Skype interview locally
Can save Skype interview to cloud

1
d.
G
am
e s Can save public activity
Can save public communication

10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Pair 1a compares saving all parts of a Twitter conversation with a conventional ownership limit imposed on saving tweets, thus saving only one’s own tweets. Pair 1b shows the effect of social distance on saving Facebook content. Pair 1c compares saving content locally with saving content to the cloud. And Pair 1d compares saving publicly visible in-game activity— on-screen avatar presence and action—with saving public in-game communication.