If you were to read the news, you would assume all community members (and thus community managers) are very concerned with their online privacy.
We have interviewed over 200 members (and prospective members), privacy wasn't mentioned.
We have survey data from 300 community professionals, privacy wasn't mentioned.
In our clients, it only arises in communities for very specific sectors (typically healthcare and finance). I can count on one hand the number of times we've had a real discussion about privacy.
Just once in the past six month has privacy been something we've discussed for more than a few minutes. Even this was in the context of using privacy as a promotional tool for a community.
This isn't to say privacy won't be an issue. It's just not as big an issue at present as media outlets would suggest. Seth might be right, people are happy to hand over their information…they just don't want to be surprised.
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