Privacy Controls and Awareness
I’ve been thinking about online social networks (OSNs for now) and why people use them, sparked by a discussion with my supervisor. OSNs such as Facebook.com (FB for now) are interesting for researchers because they show an example of a mass social phenomena, and they give a unique window from which we can observe the social trends and patterns of social information sharing that are being displayed.
A paper by Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross described the results of a quite comprehensive survey conducted in a North American college institution to try and find out the awareness of privacy controls that FB users have. Interestingly, the undergraduates in the study who expressed the highest level of concern for threats to their personal privacy are the majority joining FB, at 89.74%. This confirmed my thoughts that although people are aware of the privacy issues on these sites, they go ahead and share a ridiculously accurate description of themselves anyway, including sexual orientation, movie preferences and musical taste. Of course, it doesn’t stop there. A laughable example is a college student majoring in criminal law admitted to stealing on his blog. Why are people so open to revealing such facts to a virtual world? Is it they are so absorbed into it that they forget that the two worlds merge together as one?
Another interesting result Acquisti found is that the respondents by far deny FB is useful to them for dating or self-promotion. They claim that their real aims are to find old classmates and make it convenient to keep in contact with them. However, when asked whether how often, on average, their peers use FB for the same activities, the results differed dramatically. The tasks of keeping in touch with old classmates and communication between classmates remained ranked highly, but ones such as “showing information about themselves/advertising themselves”, “making them more popular”, or “finding dates” suddenly became very popular.
How interesting is this? These college students and staff were offered $6 to fill in a survey that they knew was anonymous. Why is it that the users have such different views on why they use the system compared to what they think their peers use it for? Is this the real root of the success of these systems?
Reference:
Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook
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