Authors:
Al Amin Hossain
and
Weining Zhang
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at San Antonio, United States
Keyword(s):
Privacy, online social networks, SNS, default settings.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Business and Social Applications
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Trust in Social Networks
Abstract:
Personal data sharing has emerged as a popular
activity on online social networks such as Facebook, Google+,
Twitter. As a result, privacy issues have received significant
attention in both the research literature and the mainstream
media. In this study, we designed a set of questions aimed to
learn about user views of online privacy, user knowledge about
OSNs privacy settings, and user awareness of privacy disclosure.
Our goal is to find out from the users whether and how well
users are knowledgable of, satisfied with, and able to effectively
use available privacy settings. The information obtained from this
study can be used to help OSNs adjust their privacy settings to
better match user expectations, and help privacy advocates design
better ways to help users control the disclosure of their online
information. We collected answers to the questions from a group
of 377 users, selected via several methods, who have experiences
with multiple OSNs, including Facebook, Google+, and Link
edIn.
We analyzed the data with respect to user demographics. Our
study shows that 44% of the users lack the knowledge about
privacy policies and mechanisms of their OSNs; 34% and 41% of
the users, respectively, are seriously and somewhat concern about
their privacy protection; and 80% of the users do not think their
OSNs have provided sufficient privacy control or default privacy
settings that match their expectations. Based on our analysis, we
propose several options for OSNs and OSN users to improve the
user privacy.
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