Privacy and Security Concern of Online Social Networks from User Perspective

Al Amin Hossain, Weining Zhang

2015

Abstract

Personal data sharing has emerged as a popular activity on online social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter. As a result, privacy issues have received significant attention in both the research literature and the mainstream media. In this study, we designed a set of questions aimed to learn about user views of online privacy, user knowledge about OSNs privacy settings, and user awareness of privacy disclosure. Our goal is to find out from the users whether and how well users are knowledgable of, satisfied with, and able to effectively use available privacy settings. The information obtained from this study can be used to help OSNs adjust their privacy settings to better match user expectations, and help privacy advocates design better ways to help users control the disclosure of their online information. We collected answers to the questions from a group of 377 users, selected via several methods, who have experiences with multiple OSNs, including Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. We analyzed the data with respect to user demographics. Our study shows that 44% of the users lack the knowledge about privacy policies and mechanisms of their OSNs; 34% and 41% of the users, respectively, are seriously and somewhat concern about their privacy protection; and 80% of the users do not think their OSNs have provided sufficient privacy control or default privacy settings that match their expectations. Based on our analysis, we propose several options for OSNs and OSN users to improve the user privacy.

References

  1. Global publics embrace social networking. pewresearchcenter, 08/03/2014.
  2. Beato, F. and Peeters, R. (2014). Collaborative joint content sharing for online social networks. In IEEE International Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Communications.
  3. Boshmaf, Yazan, e. a. (2011). The socialbot network: when bots socialize for fame and money. In Proceedings of the ACM 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference.
  4. Fang, L. and LeFevre, K. (2010). Privacy wizards for social networking sites. In Proceedings of the ACM 19th international conference on World wide web.
  5. HongxinHu, Ahn, G.-J., and Jorgensen, J. (2012). Enabling collaborative data sharing in google+. In IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).
  6. Johnson, M., Egelman, S., and Bellovin, S. M. (2012). Facebook and privacy: it's complicated. In Proceedings of the ACM eighth symposium on usable privacy and security.
  7. Krishnamurthy, B. and Wills, C. E. (2008). Characterizing privacy in online social networks. In Proceedings of the ACM First Workshop on Online Social Networks.
  8. Lappas, Theodoros, e. a. (2010). Finding effectors in social networks. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining.
  9. Lappas, T., Liu, K., and Terzi, E. (2009). Finding a team of experts in social networks. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining.
  10. Liu, Yabing, e. a. (2011). Analyzing facebook privacy settings: user expectations vs. reality. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement.
  11. Madejski, M., Johnson, M., and Bellovin, S. M. (2012). A study of privacy settings errors in an online social network. In IEEE International Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Communications.
  12. Michael Fire, e. a. (2012). Social privacy protectorprotecting users' privacy in social networks. In the second international conference on social ecoinformatics SOTICS.
  13. Miltgen, C. L. and Peyrat-Guillard, D. (2014). Cultural and generational influences on privacy concerns: a qualitative study in seven european countries. European Journal of Information Systems, 23(2):103-125.
  14. Netter, Michel, e. a. (2013). Privacy settings in online social networks-preferences, perception, and reality. In The 46th IEEE Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).
  15. Pagoto, S. L., Schneider, K. L., Oleski, J., Smith, B., and Bauman, M. (2014). The adoption and spread of a core-strengthening exercise through an online social network. Journal of physical activity & health, 11(3):648-653.
  16. Park, J. S., Kwiat, K. A., Kamhoua, C. A., White, J., and Kim, S. (2014). Trusted online social network (osn) services with optimal data management. Computers & Security, 42:116-136.
  17. Tucker, C. (2014). Social networks, personalized advertising and privacy controls. Journal of Marketing Research.
  18. Xiao, X. and Tao, Y. (2006). Personalized privacy preservation. In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Hossain A. and Zhang W. (2015). Privacy and Security Concern of Online Social Networks from User Perspective . In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-081-9, pages 246-253. DOI: 10.5220/0005318202460253


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp15,
author={Al Amin Hossain and Weining Zhang},
title={Privacy and Security Concern of Online Social Networks from User Perspective},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2015},
pages={246-253},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005318202460253},
isbn={978-989-758-081-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Privacy and Security Concern of Online Social Networks from User Perspective
SN - 978-989-758-081-9
AU - Hossain A.
AU - Zhang W.
PY - 2015
SP - 246
EP - 253
DO - 10.5220/0005318202460253