Can Your Privacy be protected on Social Networking Sites?

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CHAPTER # 1: INTRODUCTION

Background

The integration and popularity of social networking websites (SNS) has been an undeniable success for those who create and run them. Users create profiles and provide information which allows them to connect with old friends, make new friends and become part of a community that barely existed 10 years ago. One of the most popular SNS is Facebook, which has become a juggernaut in the SNS business. It allows users to add information to their profiles that could be considered sensitive such as phone numbers, relationship statuses and pictures of a user. The Harvard Business Review has weighed in on this topic, warning that “New technologies too heedlessly adopted or opportunistically applied will continue to threaten personal privacy”.

Privacy

The privacy can be defined as controlling the person's information that is revealing in any social networking sites. Privacy has not been regarded as an important issue in most of the social networking systems. Alan Westin (Westin 1967) defines privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others”. Privacy concerns have emerged globally as massive user information is collected by social networking sites. With the rise of user generated online content the definition of privacy has become more subjective. Every person might have different privacy requirements on the information content they share depending upon the context. Privacy control mechanisms should be effective enough to capture contextual information about their users and use them in semantically rich privacy constraints.

Privacy Regulations

According to the privacy regulations for the social networking sites the personal information of the users should be fully protected. In case of any breach of privacy law by the social networking sites, the user has the right to sue or ask to pay certain amount of penalty. The data of users should not be misused by SNS and must be fully protected.

Purpose of the Study

The goal of this research study was to find out how much information college-aged students who are Facebook users make public and why they allow that information to be seen by potentially millions of users when in other situations they might protect that information at all costs.

Research Question

This research study asked the questions:

“What information do college-age Facebook users consider to he sensitive or private and why do college-age Facebook users allow sensitive and private information to be public?”

“What are the data protection privacy regulations for social networking sites?”

Significance of the Study

As online social networking sites become more familiar to our students, rhetoric and composition instructors should consider the ways in which they could and already do impact the writing classroom and our pedagogical frameworks for approaching the teaching of writing. Indeed, students are already engaging in a multitude of composing processes online, including in online social networking sites. They produce a great deal of writing in these spaces through their blogs, comments, the personal profile, ...