Users’ Awareness of Privacy on Online Social Networking Sites – Case Facebook

Online social networking offers a new, easy and inexpensive way to maintain already existing relationships and present oneself to others. However, the increasing number of actions in online services also gives a rise to privacy concerns and risks. In an attempt to understand the factors, especially privacy awareness, that influence users to disclose or protect information in online environment, we view privacy behavior from the perspectives of privacy protection and information disclosing. In our empirical study, we present results from a survey of 210 users of Facebook. Our results indicate, that most of our respondents, who seem to be active users of Facebook, disclose a considerable amount of private information. Contrary to their own belief, they are not too well aware of the visibility of their information to people they do not necessarily know. Furthermore, Facebook’s privacy policy and the terms of use were largely not known or understood by our respondents