Abstract
Publishing personal content online raises issues of openness, access and privacy. While these issues have been treated in the literature, a substantial subset is youth‐oriented, typically focusing on the potential for negative outcomes from such disclosure and youths' presumed lack of awareness of the consequences of their publication activities. Recent research suggests, however, that adults also demonstrate a lack of discretion in their own publication activities. Through examining a particular class of content ‐ adult publication of photos depicting “babies in bathtubs,” and other candid and bare moments, to Flickr, a Web‐based photo sharing and management application ‐ this study aims to quantify and describe issues of openness, access and privacy to raise awareness that these issues are not limited to generational distinctions, by 1) characterizing images across multiple topical domains from two contextual perspectives, contributor and user, and 2) identifying associations between these image characteristics and contributor behaviors and profiles. The primary assumption motivating this research exercise is that online indiscretion is a youth problem, but in fact, it is broader than that; the collective “we” are all subject to failing to meet the assumed societal norms for deliberate or accidental privacy and discretion when publishing personal content to the Web.