GVU's Sixth WWW User Survey Privacy Graphs

Policies Towards Spamming

Notes:

From this survey, people are very clear that they do not like to be receive mass emailings, i.e., be spammed, but what do they propose to do about it? The majority of people responded in favor of an opt-out system, where a registry would contain the addresses of people who do not wish to receive mass emailings. Note that is is similar to the system already in place in the US that exists to remove people from junk mailing lists. Over 16% responded in favor of imposing an 'impact' fee on the agencies sending the mail. Exactly what this impact fee would be or how it would be implemented was not specified in the question. Somewhat surprisingly, only 5.89% voted in favor of government regulation making spamming illegal. This suggests that the online community favors the co-existence of users and spammers, but with users having the final say. Women and the elder generation were more in favor of an opt-out registry than their counter-parts (59.38 female vs 47.38 male and 55.91 50+ vs 48.66 19-25).

Table of Data for All Categories

Policies Towards Spamming	All	Male	Female	USA	Europe	19-25	26-50	50+
Don't Know	368.00 4.89%	207.00 4.10%	150.00 6.65%	283.00 4.65%	29.00 6.87%	67.00 4.97%	197.00 4.46%	42.00 4.82%
Government Controls	443.00 5.89%	340.00 6.73%	89.00 3.95%	338.00 5.56%	24.00 5.69%	81.00 6.01%	247.00 5.59%	36.00 4.13%
Impact Fee	1262.00 16.78%	897.00 17.77%	338.00 14.99%	1017.00 16.72%	65.00 15.40%	214.00 15.88%	769.00 17.42%	147.00 16.88%
Nothing	610.00 8.11%	467.00 9.25%	123.00 5.45%	491.00 8.07%	43.00 10.19%	120.00 8.90%	322.00 7.29%	69.00 7.92%
Other	982.00 13.06%	746.00 14.78%	216.00 9.58%	752.00 12.36%	71.00 16.82%	210.00 15.58%	598.00 13.54%	90.00 10.33%
Registry	3857.00 51.28%	2392.00 47.38%	1339.00 59.38%	3201.00 52.63%	190.00 45.02%	656.00 48.66%	2282.00 51.69%	487.00 55.91%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280