According to Kristen Nicole:

A recent study done by London-based emedia reveals that nearly two thirds of social networking users are worried about the safety of their personal data on these sites. About 31% of those surveyed have used false information about themselves to protect their identity.

The real shocker’s going to come when we find out the other 69% were lying to the surveyors.

According to Thinkprogress.org, the Minnesota Republican party distributed CDs containing a survey on social issues, and the participants’ results were sent to a remote server for tallying.

Digg called it Sony-like, but it doesn’t sound like a rootkit (link compliments of Techdirt). What it sounds like is taking advantage of gullible computer users. A survey, on a CD, with no EULA or Privacy Policy? Hmmh.

People fill out surveys and online polls so they can see the results of others. It is a curiosity thing. To expect a survey not to gather results, is well, just plain stupid. For those interested, Publicradio.org has a blow by blow of the survey’s contents.

Folks can call this what they want - Sony-like, a privacy invasion, spyware, whatever. I am going to classify the whole thing as “dumbware.”

The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study on email and spam and came up with some interesting, if not strange conclusions. Fewer Americans mistrusted email as a result of spam, and fewer said they spent less time on email as a result of spam. The Pew study concluded Americans are becoming more tolerant of spam.

Spamroll has a few thoughts on this matter.

The statistics gathered could easily be the result of the flood of consumer awareness news that has hit the streets. If people are more informed about the issues, and feel they can draw their own conclusions about a suspect message, then why wouldn’t their mistrust decline? Knowledge is power, and the message IS getting out. Second, the fact that Americans are less inclined to not use email says just about the same thing. They know to hit the delete button.

This isn’t more tolerant, its more education.

Read the report from the Globe & Mail, and tell me what you think.

By the way, the last thing we need is spammers thinking that people “are more accepting” of junk email. Regardless of the results of the survey, I would have entitled the report “Americans are Fed Up With Spam - the Forming of Citizen Militias to Tar and Feather Spammers is Imminent”. But then again, who cares what Pew thinks anyway.

People across the technology landscape have been correct in the assumption that if people never purchaed products from spammers, there would be no economic incentive to spam. It is a solic theory, and I agree.

In what might be good news for the burgeoning mobile spam phenom (if it indeed exists), it seems the potentially hardest core users of mobile services are rejecting spammers advances.

It seems college students, arguably the most voracious consumers of SMS and other mobile services, seem to dislike being spammed. According to the survey, done at Ball State University, approximately 25% reported receiving mobile spam, while 9 in 10 said that it pissed them off. Almost 70% of those surveyed said that being spammed would make them LESS likely to purchase the spammers’ target products.

While the sample size for the survey was small (roughly 1,200), the target represented a roughly 70% active text messaging user base, and 14% for instant messaging services.

Unfortunately, roughly 1% of those surveyed as receiving spam on their mobiles reported responding to it - all a spammer needs to make a living (in fact, more than they need).

For more information, read this article from MediaPost Publications.