a cynical light. Even fairly justifiable commercial reuse—an author reusing a reader’s positive review on the author’s own website—elicited negative reactions from approximately one-third of survey participants ( 68 of 203 responses). Yet participants recognized the value of their personal data and exhibited a willingness to monetize it themselves; for example, a hypothetical that posited the sale of one’s own Facebook data for personal gain tested relatively positively; 59%, or 145 of 244 participants, agreed they should be able to sell their personal content themselves.

Reusing information in a way that changes the information’s veracity (that is, so it becomes deceptive, false, or is recast in an unintended way) elicited significantly more disapproval than benign reuse. Contrast the negative responses to a hypothetical in which a podcast guest re-edited a recording of himself and vetted audience comments to eliminate damaging, but valid, material (57% of 225 participants disagreed with the guest’s right to create this remix) with a comparable positive response to republication of the podcast to seek a broader audience (81% favorable).

Humor is important when con-
tent is reused. Our study participants
seemed to feel that relatively few own-
ership restrictions should be placed on
lighthearted content that falls within
prescribed social norms. On the other
hand, reuse that is “mean,” unwar-
ranted, or offensive was judged more
harshly. A “do no harm” heuristic pro-
vides a rough guide for how people pro-
pose to reuse other peoples’ material.

Reuse for social good is viewed more skeptically than reuse of nominally humorous content. In each of our studies, a final scenario explored the idea of the U.S. Library of Congress acquiring public content from a type-specific social media service (such as Amazon Book Reviews, Facebook, Flickr, and You Tube) to create an historical collection. Three or more associated hypotheticals included in each survey tested different access restrictions on these archives. Results showed participants were more satisfied if collection access was restricted to researchers or embargoed for a 50-year period. Our own further examination of results revealed participants wanted to maintain long-term control of their public content.

Study participants are increasingly
aware of what they give up when they
publish profiles that describe them-
selves. In addition to preventing privacy
nisms. The strongest disagreement
arose when we asked the participants
to react to a hypothetical in which Face-
book sold users’ profile information to
Amazon (to target advertising). Figure
2a shows that more than 84% of our sur-
vey’s 244 participants disagreed with
the premise that this reuse is within the
service’s rights, and 57% disagreed vehe-
mently. This was the most contentious
of all of the reuse hypotheticals. Yet the
same basic hypothetical was palatable
(less than 7% objected) if the account
owner’s permission was solicited. The
two hypotheticals define opposite ends
of a spectrum of reuse attitudes.

To help tease apart the effects of the different concepts—commercial reuse, selling data, and permission—our survey proposed a third hypothetical— that Facebook can analyze internal communication among users to target advertising. This hypothetical elicited a strongly negative reaction (over 65% of our survey’s 244 participants were at least somewhat negative), although their reaction was milder than the reaction to the initial hypothetical— commercial reuse of personal content— described earlier (see Figure 2a).

Commercial reuse tends to be regarded by our study participants in

Figure 2. Social norms for content reuse.

strongly disagree slightly disagree slightly agree strongly agree agree neutral disagree

0%

2 a . Fac eboo k

2 b. G a me a r ch iv e

2c. Review archive

Can sell content-as-data to Amazon Can analyze internal messaging to target ads Needs permission to sell content-as-data Universal immediate access Researcher immediate access Universal 50-year embargo Universal immediate access Researcher immediate access Universal 50-year embargo

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

2a shows three social network hypotheticals that test commercial reuse of personal content as data. 2b and 2c compare two archival collection development scenarios, both assumed to be socially beneficial. 2b shows participant responses to proposed access limits on a collection of gaming data, And 2c shows the same limits applied to a collection of logs of gameplay.