Social Networking Sites Privacy Research Articles

The impact of third-person effect on social networking sites privacy risks and protective measures adoption among Yemeni students in Malaysia

This investigation utilized the Third-Person Effect (TPE) theory to comprehend how individuals perceive the impact of Social Networking Sites (SNS) privacy risks on themselves versus others. The TPE theory posits that individuals tend to believe that media messages, particularly negative ones, exert a diminished or negligible influence on themselves but wield a substantial impact on others. First introduced by Davison in 1983, this theory has historically been employed to examine perceived negative influences in media content, such as stereotyping and pornography. The current study focuses on the perceptions of individuals regarding the influence of SNS privacy risks, specifically among Yemeni students in Malaysia. The study aimed to achieve three primary objectives: Firstly, to investigate whether individuals perceive SNS privacy risks as affecting others more than themselves. Secondly, to examine the connection between the difference in perceived risk between oneself and others and the likelihood of recommending SNS privacy protective measures to others, and Thirdly, to evaluate the relationship between the difference in perceived risk between oneself and others and the likelihood of adopting SNS privacy protective measures for oneself. Through judgmental sampling, a total of 387 participants took part in the study, involving the distribution of an online questionnaire as the primary data collection instrument. The results of the study indicate a pronounced Third-Person Effect concerning SNS privacy risks among Yemeni students. Additionally, the study revealed that these students not only recommended privacy-protective measures to others but did not adopt the same measures for themselves. In summary, the findings support the validity of the Third-Person Effect (TPE) theory in the context of SNS privacy risks, suggesting that individuals tend to perceive the impact more on others than on themselves when experiencing fear.

Systematic review of survey scales measuring information privacy concerns on social network sites

Privacy in social network sites (SNSs) is an important issue, and many researchers have focused on understanding the effects of information privacy concerns (IPCs) on user behavior. However, to develop research capable of addressing the complexity and multilayered nature of IPCs on SNSs, valid and reliable IPC survey scales are necessary. To this end, a systematic review of IPC scales utilized in SNS research was conducted to describe the survey inventories used, identify critical issues, and suggest directions for future research. Articles measuring SNS users’ IPCs published before 2023 were reviewed systematically using the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) methodology. Altogether, 4,581 screened abstracts yielded 120 eligible articles, in which 53 different survey scales for the measurement of SNS users’ IPCs were used. These scales predominantly measure IPCs arising from organizational practices (i.e., vertical IPCs) rather than SNS user practices (i.e., horizontal IPCs). The results also indicated that scarce attention has been paid to ensuring the scales’ validity, particularly structural validity, criterion validity, and measurement invariance.

Won't You Think of Others?: Interdependent Privacy in Smartphone App Permissions

The ever increasing amount of data on smartphones often contains private information of others that people interact with via the device. As a result, one user's decisions regarding app permissions can expose the information of other parties. However, research typically focuses on consequences of privacy-related decisions only for the user who makes the decisions. Work on the impact of these decisions on the privacy of others is still relatively scant. We fill this gap with an online study that extends prior work on interdependent privacy in social networking sites to the context of smartphone permissions. Our findings indicate that people typically give less consideration to the implications of their actions for the privacy of others compared to the impact on themselves. However, we found that priming people with information that features others can help reduce this discrepancy. We apply this insight to offer suggestions for enhancing permission-specification interfaces and system architectures to accommodate interdependent privacy.

Determinants of Privacy Protection Behavior in Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are an attractive online platform for social interaction and communication. Since SNSs are easily accessed by a large number of people, a large quantity of data is also stored in the SNSs. Consequently, concern regarding the exposure to privacy risk will emerge. In this case, users need privacy protection behavior to protect their privacy in SNSs. This paper aims to determine the motivational determinants of privacy protection behavior among high school students in protecting their data or personal information when using SNSs. To identify the determinants of privacy protection behavior, a questionnaire survey was administered on 200 high school students. This study proposed a conceptual model that offers an understanding of motivational determinants of privacy protection behavior in social networking sites. Results indicate that perceived anonymity is the most significant determinant in motivating privacy behavior followed by perceived intrusiveness, perceived severity, self-efficacy, perceived vulnerability, and response efficacy. The results of this study will shed some light on understanding the levels of privacy protection behavior in SNSs, and identify suitable interventions in motivating privacy protection behavior among high school students. Finally, with the combined theory of Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and Hyperpersonal Communication Theory (HCT), this model provides the basis to direct future studies in the related field.

Enhancing University students’ privacy literacy through an educational intervention. A Greek case-study.

Social network sites (SNSs) have doubtlessly altered the way that social actors communicate and interact worldwide. Several researches have shown that users disclose personal information within SNSs, while expressing privacy concerns. Users' inability to protect their privacy within SNSs, despite their recorded privacy concerns, constitutes the core of 'Privacy Paradox' and leads to privacy breaches or risks for themselves and other users. To reverse or at least minimise users' disclosure behaviour so as to protect themselves, researches underline the need for privacy awareness increase, focusing on the crucial role of education towards this. This research aims to explore the effects of a long-term university-based educational intervention for enhancing students' digital knowledge and skills to protect their privacy in SNSs efficiently. The findings are encouraging regarding students' privacy awareness enhancement and protection strategies adoption.

Issues of Privacy in Social Networking Sites

Recently, web is a standout amongst the most proficient and compelling approaches to impart and sharing the data particularly between young generation. With more than billions of clients associated through online informal community and because of the prevalence of interpersonal organization, more individuals are worried about the protection and it has turned into a critical issue. In this paper a review is done on the privacy concerns and how privacy protection plays an important role on interpersonal organization destinations, examine how data is being impacted by web and informal community, and furthermore we will talk about how the protection turn into a hazard and how to utilize security attention to avoid threats.

Exploring Users’ Self-Disclosure Intention on Social Networking Applying Novel Soft Computing Theories

In recent years, users have increasingly focused on the privacy of social networking sites (SNS); users have reduced their self-disclosure intention. To attract users, SNS rely on active platforms that collect accurate user information, even though that information is supposed to be private. SNS marketers must understand the key elements for sustainable operation. This study aims to understand the influence of motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic) and self-disclosure on SNS through soft computing theories. First, based on a survey of 1108 users of SNS, this study used a dominance-based rough set approach to determine decision rules for self-disclosure intention on SNS. In addition, based on 11 social networking industry experts’ perspectives, this study validated the influence between the motivation attributes by using Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL). In this paper, the decision rules of users’ self-disclosure preference are presented, and the influences between motivation attributes are graphically depicted as a flow network graph. These findings can assist in addressing real-world decision problems, and can aid SNS marketers in anticipating, evaluating, and acting in accord with the self-disclosure motivations of SNS users. In this paper, practical and research implications are offered.

Attitudes toward privacy in social network and moral development of nursing students

Abstract Objective: To compare attitudes toward privacy in with social network sites (SNSs) and moral development between undergraduates nursing and advertising students.Methods: Cross-sectional study conducted with 324 nursing students and 209 advertising students selected by convenience sampling method in two universities in South Korea. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire with Likert type responses, and analyzed descriptive and analytical statistics using SPSS.Results: The most posted subject and the most regretted post on their SNS was “pictures of myself”. There was no difference in attitudes toward privacy in SNSs and moral development between nursing and advertising students. Most of students were observed in stage 3, a conventional level of moral development. At stage 4 and 5-6 in moral development, the percentages of 4th academic year of college and male students were high.Conclusion: Attitude toward privacy in SNS and moral development of nursing students need to be promoted from conventional to postconventional level.

An Exploratory Study of Attitudes Towards Privacy in Social Media and the Threat of Blackmail: The Views of a Group of Saudi Women

AbstractThe Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or the Religious Police as it is commonly known in the west, has dealt with 1834 incidents of women being blackmailed by men in 2014 and of those 22% (N= 403) were initiated using Social Network Sites (SNS). In light of the reality about these crimes, this study asked the following questions: (1) Are Saudi women concerned about their privacy in SNS? (2) Are Saudi women worried about falling victim to blackmail in SNS? (3) Do Saudi women know how to change the privacy settings in SNS? (4) Are Saudi women comfortable with communicating across gender lines in SNS? To address these questions, qualitative interviews with 16 women who used Facebook regularly and a focus group discussion with another group of 10 Saudi female students were conducted. The findings of the study show that the Saudi women interviewed appeared concerned about their privacy in Facebook, worried about falling victim to blackmail, knew how to change the privacy settings and are not comfortable with communicating across gender lines. This suggests that the participants in this study are not the likely victims of blackmail crimes. Further research is needed to understand the profile of the victims of blackmail and the root cause of these crimes.

The battle over SNS privacy for US employees and job applicants: an analysis of 2012–2013 state legislation

ABSTRACTThis study examines US legislation designed to prohibit employer access to employee and job applicant personal social networking sites (SNSs) between 2012 and 2013. It asks if the legislation addressed how employers could use SNSs in the hiring process by requesting SNS passwords, if there were consequences for violators, if employer retaliation was prohibited, if third-party access was allowed, if employee SNS monitoring was prohibited, if SNS friend requests by employers was allowed and if employer requested changes in privacy settings were prohibited. In addition, the study also examined the interest groups and political party-affiliated sponsors that were active in the creation of the legislation. The results discover important inconsistencies between the states’ legislation, which question the ability to protect worker and applicant online privacy. US policy recommendations and transnational implications follow.

Issues and Challenges of Cyber Security for Social Networking Sites (Facebook)

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Google+, and LinkedIn are the popular social sites. Facebook is most popular social networking site. Social sites are most common platform to communicate with their other friends, family and share thoughts, photos, videos and lots of information. Social networking websites have become platforms for cybercriminals for cybercrime; cybercriminals exploit sensitive and personal information through social engineering and reverse social engineering. It is usual for the users of social websites to share information; however they lose privacy, while sharing information with strangers, they can fall in honey trap made by them. Privacy has become an important concern in online social networking sites. Users are unaware of the privacy risks involved when they share their sensitive information on the social network sites. The default settings share everything, users have to change their default privacy setting options to make their accounts and personal information more secure. Security attacks continue to be a major concern of all users. How to keep social networking sites more secure and more private are the challenges that have been concern for every user. It is difficult for social networking sites and users to make and adjust privacy setting to protect privacy without practical and effective way to identify measure and evaluate privacy. Maximum numbers of users are not aware of the security risk associated whenever they shared sensitive data on the social sites, so that privacy concern will be raised among those online communications if their personal data has been shared to other users. The users should be aware of their privacy quotient and should know where they stand in the privacy measuring scale. Unfortunately many users are not aware of this and become victim of privacy and identity breach. So we conducted a survey to find users view regarding security and privacy of social networking sites and regarding default privacy setting improvement particularly Facebook.

Anonymization in Social Ne tworks: A Survey on the issues of Data Privacy in Social Network Sites

Recent years have seen unprecedented growth in the popularity of social network systems. Social networks are online applications which allow its users to connect by various link types. Online social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn are progressively utilized by many people. It makes digital communication technologies sharpening tools for extending the social circle of people. It has already become an important integral part of our daily lives, enabling us to contact our friends and families on time. As social networks have developed rapidly, recent research has begun to explore social networks to understand their structure, advertising and marketing, and data mining online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world. More and more social network data has been made publicly available and analyzed in one way or another. But some of the information revealed is meant to be private hence social network data has led to the risk of leakage of confidential information of individuals. However, privacy concerns can be used to prevent these efforts. Privacy pre- serving publishing of social network data becomes a more and more important concern. This leads for privacy-preserving social network data mining, which is the discovery of information and relationships from social network data without violating privacy. Privacy in online social networks data has been of utmost concern. Hence, the research in this field is still in its early years. Privacy preservation is a significant research issue in social networking. Since more personalized information is shared with the public, violating the privacy of a target user become much easier. We argue that the different privacy problems are entangled and that research on privacy in OSNs would benefit from a more holistic approach. In this paper, after an overview on different research subareas of SNSs, we will get more focused on the subarea of privacy protection in social network and we present a brief yet systematic review of the existing anonymization techniques for privacy preserving publishing of social net- work data.

Adolescents' response to parental Facebook friend requests: The comparative influence of privacy management, parent-child relational quality, attitude and peer influence

Smartphones greatly reduce parents' ability to monitor their children's online activities. A recommended surveillance technique is to ‘friend’ adolescents on social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook. However, adolescents use these sites to experiment with adjusting their self-image based on friends' feedback, so is it possible for them to simultaneously satisfy the very different expectations of both peers and parents? This study explores adolescents' attitudes to parental presence on Facebook using Communications Privacy Management theory (Petronio, 2002) as the theoretical framework to investigate the relative influence of privacy management, relational quality and peer pressure. The study was conducted among 262 secondary school children living at home and recruited via their schools. Results showed that while privacy management and peer influence were significantly related to adolescent attitudes to parental presence on Facebook, only attitude to parental presence on Facebook and parental-adolescent relational quality predicted friendship status. A picture emerged of adolescents very much in control of their SNS privacy who were largely indifferent to parents on Facebook. There was however, a sizable, peer-influenced minority, opposed to parental presence, for whom friendship may be counter-productive. While this study uncovered many unique associations relating to adolescent-parental Facebook friendship, further qualitative research is recommended to provide a deeper understanding of this complex subject.

Online social networking behaviors among Chinese younger and older adolescent: The influences of age, gender, personality, and attachment styles

Risks associated with adolescents’ uses of social networking sites (SNSs) propelled investigations concerning how online privacy and security behaviors are related to young people’s general activities online. To explore adolescents’ SNS behaviors, among a group of 531 volunteered adolescent participants during their junior or senior middle school years in Beijing, this study ran exploratory factor analysis based on statements from non-structured interview targeting their Renren SNS uses, and further investigated the levels of and the associations between SNS behaviors based on developmental factors of age, gender, personality, and attachment styles. Results suggest most Chinese younger and older adolescents were likely disclosing real names and photos on SNSs, and their latent utilization, socializing, and privacy disclosure SNS behaviors were influenced by age, gender, personality, or attachment styles. Moreover, the negative associations of privacy disclosure with utilization or socializing behaviors were likely affected by personality and attachment categories. Although Chinese adolescents showed some levels of concerns in their SNS privacy disclosure, education of SNS privacy and security along with adolescent care in general are perhaps helpful for providing a better online experience for young people.

Overview of Privacy in Social Networking Sites (SNS)

Networking Sites (SNS) have become an integral part of communication and life style of people in todays world. Because of the wide range of services offered by SNSs mostly for free of cost, these sites are attracting the attention of all possible Internet users. Most importantly, from all age groups have become members of Since many of the are not aware of the data thefts associated with information sharing, they freely share their personal information with Therefore, SNSs may be used for investigating users character and social habits by familiar or even unknown persons and agencies. Such commercial and social scenario, has led to number of and security threats. Though, all major issues in SNSs need to be addressed, by SNS providers, of SNS is the most crucial. And therefore, focus of this paper is on privacy in SNSs. Different ways of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakages from SNSs, information revelation to third-party domains without user consent and related threats associated with such information sharing are discussed in this paper. This comprehensive overview on in SNSs will definitely help in raising user awareness about sharing data and managing their with It will also help SNS providers to rethink about their policies. KeywordsNetworking Sites, SNS, privacy, Personally Identifiable Information, PII, PII leakage, related threats

Social Networking Websites and Image Privacy

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are being used for over a decade, and has exponentially grown in popularity in the recent few years. They are web based services that allow individuals to: (a) make a public or semipublic profile (b) share contents with many users (c) view and traverse other user list. SNS allow users to connect, share information and other comments, chat, play games, and even add comments. Social networking sites are very useful in sharing information, making friends and keeping in touch with old friends. It is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks and social elation among peoples for sharing interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. But with the increasing demand of social networking sites (SNS) privacy and security concern have also increased. The focus of our study is to measure the amount of Privacy in SNS, and based on these current techniques and attack strategies I propose a model designed in PHP to handle the privacy and security issues of SNS's. We propose a policy based infrastructure, with the help of a SNS designed in PHP, that allows: 1. Users to express their privacy preferences with respect to who can access their data and for what purpose. 2. Data provider support to enforce user privacy preferences, and supporting additional access models. 3. Handling privacy issues and access of data in SNS.

Taxonomy for Privacy Policies of Social Networks Sites

Social networking sites (SNSs) are becoming increasingly popular on the Web. Sharing personal information in these networks can be dangerous, considering that malicious users can get access to this information and use them for purposes other than the original. Although SNSs typically provide tools for users to set who can access their shared data, this access restriction only applies to network users and not for third parties and the social network itself. In this paper, we present both a mechanism to enhance privacy in SNSs and taxonomy for classifying SNSs privacy policies. We combine and extend two taxonomies of privacy, unifying them to classify SNSs privacy policies and also the aforemen-tioned mechanism. We evaluated the taxonomy classifying six SNSs privacy policies and the mechanism, presenting the results and our findings about the classification.

Too Many Facebook “Friends”? Content Sharing and Sociability Versus the Need for Privacy in Social Network Sites

Little research has been conducted on the two most important criteria for the success of social network sites (SNS), that is, content sharing and sociability, and how these affect privacy experiences and usage behavior among SNS users. This article explores these issues by employing in-depth interviews and explorative usability tests, comparing the experiences and usage of younger and older Facebook users. First, the interviews revealed that Facebook users in all age groups reported more contact with several different groups of people, which reflects different types of social capital (i.e., family, friends, and acquaintances), because of Facebook, but not without consequences for privacy. Having too many Facebook “friends” and access to different social capital disrupt the sharing process due to experiences of social surveillance and social control. This social control often forces younger people in particular to use conformity as a strategy when sharing content to maintain their privacy. Further, the interviews revealed different motivations and usage patterns when older and younger users are compared. Second, the usability test found a significant difference between younger and older adults in time completion and task completion related to Facebook settings. Younger users are more skilled in their Facebook usage, whereas adults over the age of 40 have difficulties in understanding the navigation logic and privacy settings. Younger and older adults display completely open public profiles without realizing it. Finally, the design and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.