世論 What Japan Thinks

This short but rather sweet survey from blogch and iShare into ranking of what is considered personal information made me think, and I hope it does the same for you.

Demographics

Between the 12th and 14th of May 2008 636 members of blogch completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.9% of the sample was male, 14.5% in their twenties, 46.7% in their thirties, 27.4% in their forties, and 11.5% in their teens or over fifty.

I don’t know why home email address was not included in the survey, nor why people help their age more private than their date of birth!

For me, there is no way I would part with my cell phone number and email address, and for passport number, I’d query the need for people to ask for it rather than be concerned about the privacy issue.

All junk mail, as well as all other envelopes with addresses on them, go through the shredder before disposal, although I always suspect that the reason is more to stop the rubbish police tracking us down for chucking stuff out on the wrong day!

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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research into revealing personal information on the internet where people other than friends can read it. In the middle of October 1,052 of goo’s monitor pool successfully completed a private web-based questionnaire. 56.4% of the sample was female, and 2.5% in their teens, 22.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties. Regular readers may remember a previous survey on a similar subject showing that over 90% of bloggers were anonymous.

Although the survey’s main theme is about the online world, the first two questions presented in the summary report actually refer to issues regarding real-world businesses. It seems odd to me that people are twice as wary of giving out their date of birth over the internet than in real life.

Personally, I feel reluctant to revealing my email address in particular, as I’m never sure what spam I’ll end up with, and a lot of Japanese companies, even reputable ones, do not provide simple one-click unsubscribe options.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with Cross Marketing, recently investigated mobile phone privacy. They sampled 150 men and 150 women, 16.6% aged 18 or 19, 16.6% in their twenties, and so on up to 16.6% in their sixties.

Note that over three times as many people take their mobiles into public toilets than into their toilet at home. I wonder what is hidden behind that statistic! Im also rather surprised to see that less than a third of all user employ any security locks on their phone; note almost all phones have lock features what require a four digit code to open them. Some of the more advanced phones go as far as having a fingerprint reader that may be used to unlock the device.
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