Approximately one-fourth of American adult internet users (24%) have placed online phone calls, according to a survey released by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
The survey revealed that on any given day 5% of internet users go online to place phone calls.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project said that in February 2007, 8% of internet users (6% of all adults) had placed calls online and 2% of internet users were making calls on any given day.
The numbers have grown over the years.
In April 2009, Pew revealed that 19% of Americans have tried video calls or video chat either online or on a mobile phone; and 23% of all Internet users and 7% of cell phone owners have made or participated in video calls.
For the survey, Pew surveyed 2,253 American adults over the age of 18 on their internet behaviors between August and September.
In 2000s, approximately a tenth of internet users had used the Internet to place calls and the daily figure was below 1% of internet users.
In another study in the past, Pew found that 57% of adults have used search engines to find information about themselves online (up 10% from 2006), and 71% of social networking users 18-29 have changed their profile privacy settings.
Pew said that the young adult demographic is the most privacy-conscious: 44% of 18-29 year-olds have made efforts to limit the personal information they share online, 47% of the same group have deleted comments on their profile and 41% have removed their name from photos they were tagged in.
In addition, 28% of these same young adults say that they can ‘never’ trust social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.
However, the older demographic is less privacy-concious with only 55% of social networking adults 50-64 have changed their default privacy settings, and only 20% of seniors 65 and older have actively limited the personal information they post online.
