Privacy Albeit Late

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook and Twit-ter have experienced exponential growth in recent years. Users are spending more time on OSNs than on any other sites and services on the Internet. Users post and share a lot of personal information on these sites without being aware of privacy implications or simply not caring much about them, what turns to be a treasure for marketing companies and cyber criminals. Characterizing the privacy awareness of users is important to design technologies and policy solu-tions. Users expect the OSN to provide good privacy protec-tion or controls so they can make informed decisions about their privacy. This paper investigates the privacy aware-ness of users on Facebook using real-world data (not self reported). The main findings are: only a low percentage of users change the default privacy settings; a large percentage of users expose their gender publicly; women are more con-cerned about disclosing personal information online; many users share their photo albums and links (content) to every-one; users exercise more control over content that are more potentially dangerous to their reputation. The present study is one of the first to characterize the privacy awareness on OSN through a real world experiment. Implications of the study are discussed