...Nielsen is investigating whether consumers would be more willing to cooperate with its Internet and TV convergence panels if Nielsen agreed to "limit monitoring to certain sites." Previous Nielsen research indicated that one of the biggest obstacles confronting such convergence research is consumer concern over the privacy of their Internet behavior [also known as the "porn problem"].

The Pew Internet Project has asked the adult web site question in five different surveys over the last five years, yielding between 13%-15% of internet users who say yes. When we talk to other researchers and internet experts about these findings, very few think that these figures accurately reflect the number of American adults who have accessed porn online.

Of course this isn't only a porn-related issue. Though I don't have any statistics to substantiate my claim, it's a good guess that many fewer people admit to downloading copyrighted music via P2P networks than actually do so. And there are still tens of thousands of pirated copies of Windows in use by people who swear that their copies are legitimate.

Even so, social networking communities that focus on certain types of music, or various aspects of computing, have little difficulty flourishing, while communities devoted to porn, if anybody is really trying to build them, have a much harder time establishing themselves.