世論 What Japan Thinks

With stories about the dangers of Winny flying around, japan.internet.com jumped on the bandwagon (see my previous stories on Winny usage and the greatest security threats of 2005), publishing a survey carried out in conjuction with goo Research to find out about people’s use of file sharing software. They interviewed 1,071 people from their internet monitor group. 41.6% of the respondents were male, 23.2% in their twenties, 44.1% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 7.5% in their fifties.

This survey talks about confidential data leakage due to Winny viruses, but I have not seen any information that confirms it is due to viruses, and not just down to people sharing their whole hard disk or the like.

I did once or twice use Winny, but gave up as first the download rate was unbelievably slow, second the selection of material was pretty poor (or my understanding of Japanese was), and third it was, as is much Japanese user interface design, incredibly cluttered and unintuitive for me to use.
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In the middle of March this year iShare surveyed the users of their CLUB BBQ mail forwarding service to see what they thought about file-sharing (or P2P) software. They got replies from 783 people, 74% male, but no age breakdown is available.

The most (in)famous P2P program in Japan is Winny, which has been responsible for rather a few data leaks. To be strictly correct, however, the software is not responsible, it’s the user for not knowing how to set it up correctly that’s the problem, along with lax security that allows people to install dodgy software on work computers, or to place confidential information on their home PCs. See also my other recent article that ranks it as the second greatest threat of 2005!

Note that since people are being asked to describe how they may be breaking the law, there might be some degree of reluctance for people to answer truthfully, so perhaps the true rate of file-sharing within this survey group is higher than reported. Note also that the population that has been surveyed here is perhaps a bit heavy on otaku.

Finally, BitTorrent is P2P but has a decent number of legitimate uses – how did that affect the results obtained? Is it even well-known in Japan?

UPDATE: translated and published another file sharing software use poll.
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