Last week I asked the burn­ing ques­tion: do web pro­fes­sion­als use anti-virus pro­grams on their own machines? I don’t — I find no need to. I was curi­ous as to how many of my peers shared my view.

And the results?

• 66 peo­ple voted.
• 41% — the major­ity plu­ral­ity — said that they believed anti-virus was necessary.
• 30% (20) of those peo­ple agreed with me that anti-virus was unnec­es­sary for peo­ple who knew what they were doing.
• 14% said that they have anti-virus, but only because they shared their machine with others.
• Another 14% ran their anti-virus only on demand.
• Only one respon­dent thought the poll was stu­pid and point­less — a sur­pris­ingly low number!

The per­cent­ages who either shared their machines or used anti-virus only on demand didn’t sur­prise me — I’ve been in both sit­u­a­tions in the past. Of those who insisted that anti-virus was nec­es­sary, one was quite force­ful about it in the com­ments, remind­ing me that I hadn’t put in a dis­claimer to say that I do always surf behind a fire­wall router. Another com­menter was strongly in the no-AV-for-me camp. And apart from Jamw­erx Dave yam­mer­ing on about his beloved Mac — despite my dire warn­ing that I wasn’t inter­ested — all the other com­menters were fairly middle-of-the-road in their attitudes.

One inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic was that for the first few hours — in fact, until about the first 40 responses — the “I don’t use anti-virus” camp was in the lead. The post was put live on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing in Aus­tralia, so maybe this means that those fanat­i­cal indi­vid­u­als who have their feed reader open per­ma­nently, all hours of the day and night includ­ing week­ends, are more likely to be con­fi­dent enough in their own com­puter skills to not rely on anti-virus. Or maybe it’s com­pletely ran­dom and meaningless.

So was I sur­prised by the results? Not really! Have I been con­vinced that anti-virus is nec­es­sary for me? Absolutely not! Was it an inter­est­ing exer­cise? Actu­ally, yes, despite the pre­dictable out­come, it was inter­est­ing to see how strongly peo­ple feel about the issue. It will be inter­est­ing to ask the same ques­tion in another 12 months or two years, when Vista has been out for a while, to see if that changes anyone’s opin­ions. Hmm, so many more poten­tial ques­tions. How many web devel­op­ers dis­able UAC? What about Win­dows Defender? Bah, I’ll leave those for when I’m bored :)