Category A responses provide some interesting questions. The choice to reveal personal
information may be attributed to peer-pressure or curiosity. Because a certain student’s peers and friends are users and are sharing certain types of information, that student may feel obligated to become a user. If they do not feel obligated, the student might instead have more trust of other users because of how much information others share, and therefore act carelessly when sharing information.
On the other hand, Category B also has high responses. Users of Facebook also joined
because they hoped to make it more convenient for others to get in touch with them, find
classmates, and find friends with mutual interests. High response in this category suggests that
users see Facebook as a tool. Their decision to join was based on information about what the site can actually be used for. If users made an informed decision to join Facebook, then maybe they see the benefit of the information that they are sharing and they believe it outweighs the cost of a loss in privacy.
Since users provided high responses for reasons to join Facebook in both categories, then
either analysis could be correct or it could be a combination of the above analyses. Users may be informed about what the benefits and risks are to an extent, but they could still be influenced to join and use Facebook based on peer pressure and because everyone else is doing it. Users may be misinformed on not only all the benefits of Facebook, but also some of the risks of divulging large amounts of personal information. We discuss our results as far as the use and knowledge of privacy settings in the next section of this paper.