GVU's Eighth WWW User Survey Privacy Graphs

Knowledge of Information Logged per Page Request

Notes:

The purpose of this question is to gauge respondents knowledge of what happens during a web transaction. In standard web transactions, the time of request, the page requested, the machine's IP address, the type of browser, the operating system, and a session identifier (for major browsers) can be recorded. Email address and screen size cannot be recorded directly in a standard web transaction. A flaw in an older version of Netscape at one time allowed email address to be captured, but it is generally not possible. Java applets have access to the screen size and so that information could be captured and sent back to a server. Geographic location information is not directly available, but can sometimes be inferred from the user's IP address/domain name.

Only about 80% of users correctly recognized that the time of the request and page they were requesting was being recorded. This is a decline from the lat survey where nearly 90% answered these correctly. In fact for all categories which can be recorded directly, the percentage of users who answered correctly declined by several percentage points. European respondents, who tend to be more experienced than US respondents, had a better knowledge of what is recorded during a web transaction. Males are somewhat more informed about what information can be recorded although the same percentage of males and females think that email address can be recorded (53%). Those in the middle age ranges (19-50) are more informed about the information collected in web transactions than older or younger users. As we might expect, experts are more knowledgeable than novices.