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User behaviour in social networking: An empirical analysis of privacy and security issues

User behaviour in social networking: An empirical analysis of privacy and security issues

The purpose of this United Kingdom based research is to explore user behaviour and to discover the reasons to accept strangers as 'friend'; to focus the patterns of personal information exposure in Facebook by the United Kingdom users, to identify and contrast behavioural differences between the factors. Also, the research aimed to identify the groups that the most open to privacy risks, to contribute raising the social networking security awareness in the UK.

The reason of this research to be the United Kingdom based is although there are some researches carried out in other countries such as USA, Canada and Australia, there is no known published study that specifically covers the United Kingdom off-campus general FB users.

Based on the surge in online communication, researchers have begun to explore self-disclosure online (e.g., [Christofides et al., 2009], [Henderson and Gilding, 2004], [Joinson, 2001] and [Tidwell and Walther, 2002]). Relatively little is known about how people use online social networking sites. Recent studies have begun to examine the use of online technology and the associated attitudes and behaviors that surround online communication (e.g., [Ellison et al., 2007], [Walther et al., 2008] and [Zhao et al., 2008]). However, research in this area is sparse and even fundamental issues, such as accurately capturing the kinds of information that are available through online communication profiles or understanding patterns of information disclosure, are not yet fully defined. Before we can begin to understand why online communication is used or determine the purpose of this communication tool, it is first important to determine what can be communicated when using this tool.

The present study provides a comprehensive examination of the information of the potential content available through the Facebook online social networking profiles and, in addition, begins to explore means for understanding what information is most likely to be disclosed and by whom.

Personal web-pages and online profile networks have emerged at an increasing rate with social networking sites, including Facebook, gaining rapid popularity (Yum, 2007). Facebook is a social communication tool designed to allow users to contact and communicate with other Facebook users (www.Facebook.com). Founded in 2004 and originally designed as a social networking site for students at Harvard University, Facebook is now available to anyone who is older than 13 years of age. Currently, the site has over 61 million active users (Statistics, Facebook, 2008).

The Facebook infrastructure is made up of a variety of networks that are based around companies, schools or geographical regions. Privacy settings can be used to control access to personal profiles, such that only designated friends and users within shared networks can be provided access to profiles. For those users that do not employ privacy settings, however, profiles are accessible to any Facebook member. Once a member, users can search for friends (these can be actual friends, acquaintances or even strangers) on Facebook, and add them to their ...