The literature highlights that privacy is often considered the number one obstacle to
online growth. This argument may hold true within an e-commerce setting; however,
within social networking, while privacy concerns exist and are prompting protective action,
the rate of adoption to social networking sites continues to accelerate. The level of activity
documented in this study on Facebook, despite a high level of privacy concerns and risk
awareness, shows privacy is not a prime obstacle to social networking sites because the
majority of users are actively protecting themselves by changing their privacy settings.