The Ownership and Control of Online Photos and Game Data: Patterns, Trends, and Keeping Pace with Evolving Circumstances

Using a series of media type-specific studies, we have identified social norms associated with the ownership and control of user-contributed content and data stored in online collections. These norms constrain everyday reuse of this material, as well as prefiguring public reactions to institutional archiving efforts. In this paper, we describe two studies, one of photos and the other of multiplayer games, originally run in 2010 and 2013 respectively, that we reran in 2018 to establish whether specific norms are stable or evolving. Analysis of data from 455 new participants, 235 collected via the photo study and 220 via the games study, revealed that many previous results are stable, but there are important changes too that seem to stem from increased online experience, as well as additional experience with the media type in question. Overall, the barriers to institutional archiving of collections of user-contributed online material seem to be diminishing over time. At the same time, participants exhibit a greater sensitivity to privacy issues-along with some privacy fatigue (which has resulted in a looser grasp on ownership)-and more sophisticated reasoning about potential reuse situations, both benign and malicious.