Abstract
Online social networking communities such as Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. These sites have changed how many people develop and maintain relationships through posting and sharing personal information. The amount and depth of these personal disclosures have raised concerns regarding online privacy. We expand upon previous research on users' under-utilization of available privacy options by examining users' current strategies for maintaining their privacy, and where those strategies fail, on the online social network site Facebook. Our results demonstrate the need for mechanisms that provide awareness of the privacy impact of users' daily interactions.
Highlights
Online social networking has evolved into a social phenomenon on websites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, with approximately 110 million and sixty million active users on the sites respectively [9]
The online behaviors of our participants closely resemble those of previous studies, where users primarily join social networking sites to strengthen their relationships [8, 11, 13], regularly engage with other users through features of the site [4, 6], maintain large social networks and disclose high levels of personal information [11, 12, 13, 18], and underutilize the extensive privacy options [12, 18]
Despite our small sample size, we believe that the patterns of behavior identified in our study are representative of college-aged Facebook users
Summary
Online social networking has evolved into a social phenomenon on websites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, with approximately 110 million and sixty million active users on the sites respectively [9]. Participation on these sites has surpassed participation in all other online activities and the majority of respondents to DeGagne and Wolk’s (2006) survey reported Facebook/MySpace as their primary online “addiction” [5] The benefits of these sites include communicating with and strengthening personal connections, both with friends already known offline and with people known only virtually. As part of their participation in these online communities, Internet users are revealing a large amount of personal information to manage their identity and build social capital [8, 10, 14]. Decisions of privacy, what to disclose and how, must be made a priori and explicitly
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