דעות מוטעות לגבי שיתוף קבצים

This study sheds light on false beliefs regarding file sharing. We used a questionnaire (N = 110) to measure the participants’ intuitive opinions regarding cloud-based file sharing vs. sharing files using email attachments. We then compared our results to well-validated scientific findings. The majority of our participants thought that cloud-based file sharing is preferred to email-based sharing, that file retrieval from shared cloud-based repositories is more successful than retrieval from personal repositories after email sharing, and that in the future cloud-based sharing will replace email sharing as the dominant file sharing method. Contrary to these beliefs, research has shown that people encountered difficulties when co-organizing shared files with their collaborators, and were less successful when retrieving shared files from cloud-based shared repositories than from personal repositories after email sharing. These papers point to additional shortcomings of cloud-based file sharing compared to email-based file sharing: The need to agree on a sharing platform (two people using different email software can send a file attachment to each other, however, two people using different cloud-based storage services cannot use them to share a file), control problems (collaborators can mistakenly change or delete the file) and alert problems. Our findings indicate that these previous findings are counterintuitive.