Insights on Privacy and Ethics from the Web's Most Prolific Storytellers

Abstract

An analysis of narratives in English-language weblogs reveals a unique population of individuals who post personal stories with extraordinarily high frequency over extremely long periods of time. This population includes people who have posted personal narratives everyday for more than eight years. In this paper we describe our investigation of this interesting subset of web users, where we conducted ethnographic, face-to-face interviews with a sample of these bloggers (n = 11). Our findings shed light on a culture of public documentation of private life, and provide insight into these bloggers' motivations, interactions with their readers, honesty, and thoughts on research that utilizes their data. We discuss the ethical implications for researchers working with web data, and speak to the relationship between large social media datasets and the real people behind them.