Survey Analysis

Click here to see our survey results. 

       As part of our project, we conducted a survey to understand people’s level of 
privacy concerns regarding different types of personal information. The survey polled 
Yale College students* to rate certain elements of personal information and certain types 
of privacy-related data on a scale of most private to least private. For the majority of 
questions, the survey taker ranked the element with one of five options.  

       The survey asked people to evaluation his/her feelings on sexual orientation, 
biological sex, religion, home address, income/financial aid status, criminal record, GPA, 
sexual history and medical history on a scale from most private to least private. Sexual 
history was by far the most private element of personal information.  On the contrary, 
religion, biological sex, and sexual orientation were rated least private. Widespread 
concerns about privacy regarding sexual history is likely explained by the near universal 
experience of at least one somewhat regrettable hookup while in college. It is also 
understandable that more people declared religion, biological sex and sexual orientation 
as “least private” than the number who considered it “most private.” For many privacy- 
related issues, these three included, the topic becomes increasingly private if not a 
member of the majority. For example, none of the survey respondents considered 
biological sex “most private.” However, it is also quite possible that the one hundred 
respondents identify with their biological sex. 

       On average, respondents found GPA to be moderately to somewhat private. This 
is interesting because GPA is often required on resumés. In contrast to this, people seem 
to be lulled into nonchalance concerning their home address. Few people rated their home 
address as very private information. It is likely that the seemingly constant need to 
provide a home address for various purposes and the ease of locating home addresses 
online have reduced the concern a person has over the release of this information.  
Several interesting observations can be derived from the technology-related data 
portion of the survey. For this section, respondents were asked to rate search engine 
history, web browser history, content of emails, test messages, phone location data, credit 
card charges, chat history and Facebook on a scale from least private to most private. The 
results of this section reveal the types of data most similar to conversations – email, texts 
and chat history - were widely held to be very private. Although not a conversation, web 
browser history was considered the third most private type of data. 

       The types of data further removed from conversations were generally held to be 
less private. Search engine history was the fourth least private type of data and more 
people consider their phone location data least private than the number who considers it 
most private. These findings were somewhat surprising and may be explained through a 
lack of awareness. Respondents may not have ever thought about the information that 
may be revealed through a conglomerate of individual searches or webpages. Concerning 
the cellphone location data, it seems that people may not have realized that this data 
actually gives away the location of his/her physical person since people are generally    
attached to their cell phones in today’s society. It is also possible that survey respondents 
were unaware of the specificity of phone location data, instead thinking it was general 
like “New Haven, CT” instead of “241 Elm St, New Haven, CT.”  Survey respondents 
placed Facebook as the third least private data source**. One possible explanation for this 
is that a person rated his/her Facebook as not so private because he/she is generally more 
aware of Facebook’s data aggregation practices and plans to share their information 
accordingly than a web browser.  

        Concluding the survey, respondents were asked if they password protect their cell 
phones and/or laptops. Sixty-two percent of respondents have password-protected laptops 
and 30 percent of those surveyed lock their cellular phones. These numbers are in 
accordance with the amount of information stored each device, meaning more 
information is stored on a laptop than a cell phone. According to the survey, people 
generally consider their texts and their emails equally private. Though the divide is 
shrinking, the majority of people still store more data on their laptop than their cell 
phone. However, cell phones (which are less frequently locked) are more likely to be 
misplaced, lost, or stolen. Another interesting note is that 62 percent of survey 
respondents show through locking their phones that they value their personal privacy 
over the usefulness of having a stranger be able to return their phone if found by someone 
else.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*We acknowledge that Yale students are not a representative subset of the American population as whole. In particular, Yale students are typically between the ages of 18 and 22 and have had a different educational background than the average America. We determined the benefits of feedback from students who had not spent the semester reading and discussing technology and privacy issues outweighed the possibly skewing of results that such a sample group would produce. Over 200 students took the survey, but due to a problem with the survey design only around 100 responses were used for the questions of most private to least private.  

** We do acknowledge that using "Facebook" in our survey was relatively vague:respondents could have interpreted this to include all the information one has ever placed on Facebook, or just the publicly available posts, photographs, etc.