Addendum on Internet penetration and privacy expectations

A couple of weeks back I posted some data from an SSI survey in a number of Asian countries in which respondents were asked about the degree to which they agree or disagree with this statement:

Companies should be allowed to collect information from social networking sites when it is posted online in a public forum.

I did a quick correlation of percent agree (completely agree plus somewhat agree) with Internet penetration and came up with -.95.  In other words, the higher the country's Internet penetration the less likely they are to agree that that companies should be allowed to collect information from social networking sites when it is posted online in a public forum. From this I concluded that the more mainstream Internet penetration becomes the greater expectation of privacy in social media. Pete Cape from SSI then sent me data on the seven major EU countries to add into the Asia data to redo the exercise. I did that and the correlation fell to -.83. I only have an N of 13 but nonetheless I think my previous conclusion stands, my hypothesis confirmed. 

The other striking thing about these data is how few people agree with that statement, especially in the EU and US.