A team led by Noellie Brockdorff from the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences of the University of Malta is leading research about the behaviour of online users in social media including Facebook and Twitter.
This is part of Consent, a research project which groups 19 partners from 13 countries and which is being supported with €2.6 million from the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme.
One of the key changes in societal trends and lifestyles witnessed over the past few years has been the move on-line of many consumers and the way they have become increasingly sophisticated in their media consumption habits.
When visiting a website users are often asked to give personal information. The website generally asks users' permission to use this information, a process called the obtaining of consent.
The Consent project seeks to examine how consumer behaviour and commercial practices are changing the role of consent in the processing of personal data.
Consumer consent is a fundamental value on which the European market economy is based, and the project studies the way consumer consent is obtained in popular user-generated online services such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter whose commercial success depends to a large extent on the disclosure by their users of substantial amounts of personal data.
The Consent project has launched an online survey across all of Europe in most of the languages of the European Union to collect the views of internet users.
Responses to this survey will be studied and feedback obtained will be taken into consideration when preparing policy briefs for the European Commission. This is a real opportunity for online users to influence the way how things are run on the internet since the results of the survey will be taken into consideration when preparing new European policies and laws about internet use.
The survey is available at http://bit.ly/Survey-CONSENT-Malta
The Consent project commenced in May 2010 as is expected to run until April 2013. Other researchers in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences at the University of Malta contributing to this project include Prof. Saviour Chircop, Prof. Albert Caruana and Marco Montalto.