Social Big Data and Privacy Awareness

Based on the rapid development of Big Data, the data from the online social network becomea major part of it. Big data make the social networks became data-oriented rather than social-oriented. Taking this into account, this dissertation presents a qualitative study to research howdoes the data-oriented social network affect its users’ privacy management for nowadays. Within this dissertation, an overview of Big Data and privacy issues on the social network waspresented as a background study. We adapted the communication privacy theory as a frameworkfor further analysis how individuals manage their privacy on social networks. We study socialnetworks as an entirety in this dissertation. We selected Facebook as a case study to present theconnection between social network, Big Data and privacy issues. The data that supported the result of this dissertation collected by the face-to-face and in-depthinterview study. As consequence, we found that the people divided the social networks intodifferent level of openness in order to avoid the privacy invasions and violations, according totheir privacy concern. They reduced and transferred their sharing from an open social networkto a more close one. However, the risk of privacy problems actually raised because peopleneglected to understand the data process on social networks. They focused on managed theeveryday sharing but too easily allowed other application accessed their personal data on thesocial network (such like the Facebook profile)