Personality’s Influence on Facebook’s Privacy Settings: A Case of College Students in Taiwan

Abstract

Social networking sites such as Facebook have been experiencing tremendous growth for the last several years. In order to get connected with people, Facebook users have to create personal profile with real data about themselves, such as name, home address, email address, phone numbers, relationship status etc. However, there have been ongoing concerns about information disclosure and privacy. Research has indicated personality is one of many factors may have some influence on Facebook’s usage, information disclosure, and privacy. The purpose of this research was to investigate possible influence of personality on Facebook privacy settings. Five hypotheses about personality and Facebook privacy settings were developed. Data were collected from 500 college students in Taiwan, with 441 valid data. Four hypotheses about personality and privacy settings were partial supported. People with high extraversion had low privacy settings on family and relationships, religious and political view, and birthday. People with high agreeableness had high privacy settings on wall, photos and videos, religious and political view, birthday, and comments. People with high continuousness had high privacy settings on browsing personal profile and searching personal profile. People with high emotional stability had high privacy settings on religious and political views, and birthday. However, one hypothesis about openness and privacy settings was not supported.