Hello, my name is Fernanda Viégas and I am a PhD candidate working in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I am the person behind this survey and this is part of the final project for a class I took last semester on Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier: Electronic Surveillance and Copyright Control. 

Why am I running this specific survey on blogs?

Web logs, also known as blogs have gone from being a once marginal activity of Internet enthusiasts to becoming squarely mainstream. With the gradual upgrade to a more “serious” publishing venue, blog authors are finding themselves increasingly liable for their chattiness. My paper will explore the tension between the “freedom” experienced by authors in their blog sites and the legal predicaments they are bound to experience as online publishers in the near future. 

By conducting an online survey with bloggers, I hope to determine the expectations of privacy and accountability that authors have when they blog. The only way to find out whether authors' expectations are in line with the current protection allotted to them by the law is to get feedback from bloggers on how they think about issues of privacy and liability as they publish online.

I am happy to share my results with all who are interested. You can indicate, at the end of the survey, whether you would like to be notified of the results.

I will hold the responses to the survey in strict confidence. I am not tracking the IP addresses of respondents. No individuals will be ever identified by me and the dataset of responses will be destroyed after the analysis is done. While it is understood that no computer transmission can be perfectly secure, reasonable efforts will be made to protect the confidentiality of all transmission. By completing this survey you are giving your informed consent to the primary researcher (Fernanda Viégas) to analyze the data. If you do not want to participate in this study please do not fill out this survey.  

Basically, I will treat the data I collect here in the same way I would like my data to be treated: with respect and confidentiality.   

Do you have questions? Concerns? Comments about the survey?
Please contact me via: blog-survey@media.mit.edu