Privacy Issues on Social Media: A Risky Trade Off of Personal Information

Personal information on the web must be handled very delicately for its exposure can leave the victim with their identity stolen and destitute. Although security measures are normally implemented to prevent such breaches, targeted hacks continuously occur. However, the authors noticed that among 36 of the Facebook groups they frequent, 70% in aggregate willingly exposed their emails and other identifying details in exchange for detailed job recruitment reports and other related resources. First, we created a search engine that returned all the public posts where an individual commented their email. We segmented these commenters into three groups each with different treatment. We conducted a pre-post study over the course of five months that incorporated clickstream analysis and quantitative records for all groups using the search engine to determine whether both it and the survey in tandem measurably reduced the number of times the user submitted personal information after being confronted with the grave ramifications such behavior could have on their social, mental, and monetary wellbeing. From this, we determined how best to persuade commenters to reduce the number of posts they make in the future through evaluating the cogency of our search engine