Online social networks offer exciting new opportunities for interaction and communication, but also raise new privacy concerns. Among them, the Facebook stands out for its vast membership, its unique and personally identifiable data, and the window it offers on the information revelation behavior of millions of young adults.
In our study we have combined survey instruments with data mined from a FB community at a North American college Institution. We looked for demographic or behavioral differences between the communities of the network’s members and non-members, and searching for motivations driving the behavior of its members. Our analysis is going to be complemented by other experiments, but we can summarize here a number of initial results.
Age and student status obviously are the most significant factors in determining FB membership. However, we observe that privacy attitudes also play a role, but only for the non undergraduate population. In fact, most of highly privacy concerned undergraduates still join the network. While a relative majority of FB members in our sample are aware of the visibility of their profiles, a significant minority is not. The ‘aware’ group seems to rely on their own ability to control the information they disseminate as the preferred means
of managing and addressing their own privacy concerns. However, we documented significant dichotomies between specific privacy concerns and actual information revelation behavior. In addition, misunderstanding or ignorance of the Facebook (the Company)’s treatment of personal data are also very common.
It is interesting to note that a pilot study we ran in September 2005 provided similar results, but also small, yet significant differences in terms of members’ awareness of their profile visibility and their ability to control it: respondents a few months ago appeared less aware of privacy risks and of means of managing their own profiles. This evidence may suggest that the widespread public attention on privacy risks of online social networks is affecting, albeit marginally, some of their users.
Online social networks offer exciting new opportunities for interaction and communication, but also raise new privacy concerns. Among them, the Facebook stands out for its vast membership, its unique and personally identifiable data, and the window it offers on the information revelation behavior of millions of young adults. In our study we have combined survey instruments with data mined from a FB community at a North American college Institution. We looked for demographic or behavioral differences between the communities of the network’s members and non-members, and searching for motivations driving the behavior of its members. Our analysis is going to be complemented by other experiments, but we can summarize here a number of initial results.Age and student status obviously are the most significant factors in determining FB membership. However, we observe that privacy attitudes also play a role, but only for the non undergraduate population. In fact, most of highly privacy concerned undergraduates still join the network. While a relative majority of FB members in our sample are aware of the visibility of their profiles, a significant minority is not. The ‘aware’ group seems to rely on their own ability to control the information they disseminate as the preferred meansof managing and addressing their own privacy concerns. However, we documented significant dichotomies between specific privacy concerns and actual information revelation behavior. In addition, misunderstanding or ignorance of the Facebook (the Company)’s treatment of personal data are also very common.It is interesting to note that a pilot study we ran in September 2005 provided similar results, but also small, yet significant differences in terms of members’ awareness of their profile visibility and their ability to control it: respondents a few months ago appeared less aware of privacy risks and of means of managing their own profiles. This evidence may suggest that the widespread public attention on privacy risks of online social networks is affecting, albeit marginally, some of their users.
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