[Broad Review if Publicly Available Micro Information as Twitter Flicker Facebook and My Space]

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Introduction

Would you give your name and phone number to a complete stranger? May be. What about your age, picture, email, birthday, and billing address? It is possible you already have done so. Every day people compromise their privacy online. Although some research show Americans as cautious and wary when disclosing information on the Internet, other arguments (Barnes, 2006) suggest that people may not realize what they have given away or how accessible their information really is. When discussing privacy and the Internet, a number of studies have focused on privacy in regards to online marketing and making online purchases. These studies have found consumers to be both trusting and suspicious when revealing personal information to an online entity. (Markel 197)

Shopping online, however, is not the only way consumers disclose personal information on the Internet. Social networking sites (SNS) also collect a great deal of personal information about their members. As social networking sites become more and more popular, they may be one place on the Internet where users feel more secure than they actually are. Facebook alone has 58 million active users all of who have handed over some personal information to be a part of the site. Many people view social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as private web pages and are willing to display personal information such as their name, address, and other contact information. Users may also post personal photos, blogs and links. Because the users view their pages as private, they would not expect the information posted to be viewed by the general public.

Research Questions

The research aims at answering the following research questions:

What differences are there between self-reported heavy and light users of social networking sites and the user's self-reported perceived depth of communication?

What differences are there between self-reported heavy and light users of social networking sites and their self-reported perceived levels of privacy?

What differences are there between self reported heavy and light users of social networking sites and their self-reported desired levels of privacy?

Methodology (Literature Search)

The relevance of the research topic and the publication year will be the criteria for the selection of appropriate literature. The usage of public, private and the online libraries will be made for the collection of the most valid available information. A few online databases for the gathering of data accessed are going to be: Questia, Proquest, Pheonix, Ebsco and so on.

Literature Review

In a study of YouTube, a video social networking site, Lange (2007) concluded that privacy online can no longer be classified as strictly public or private. The study examined the “fractalized patterns” (para. 14) of communication through interviews, observations and analyses of posted videos and comments, and examination of subscription and friending practices on YouTube over the course of a year. Lange reported a dichotomy of publicly private and privately public behavior. The dichotomy refers to the idea that the user's identity may be public or private, and the user's page ...