An Analysis on the Relation between Users’ Online Social Networks

Addiction and Users Security Concerns

Gulsum Akkuzu Kaya

and Ben Sanders

Computer Engineering, Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, Rize, Turkey

Department of Digital Futures, University of Winchester, Winchester, U.K.

Keywords:

Online Social Networks, Addiction, Security Concerns, Model Development, Analysis.

Abstract:

Use of online social network platforms has increased over last decades. There are various activities that users

can do on those platforms such as, making friends, enjoying time, making business, and education. Given

activities make online social network platforms more attractive and users want to spend more time on those

platforms. Although there is a massive increment in their use, they are not secure enough to fully protect

their users’ data and privacy. Some users are not aware of the security settings (i.e. privacy settings) since

most users focus on spending time on those platforms which brings online social networks addiction into the

consideration. Addiction is deﬁned with time dependency in most of the literature works, however, calling a

person as an addicted person depends on various factors. This work provides three main contributions;

1-) It clariﬁes the deﬁnition of addiction with a quantitative model.

2-) It provides an analysis on online social networks addiction; answers the question ”whom could be called

as an addicted user to those platforms”

3-)It provides an analysis on users’ trusts to online social networks platforms.

1 INTRODUCTION

The popularity of online social networks (OSNs) plat-

forms has brought a new way of communication to

today’s world. OSNs users connect to each others,

create groups or join to groups. There are various rea-

sons that make people to join to OSNs platforms, such

as, business, education, and enjoyment. Since OSNs’

platforms provide a virtual environment where loca-

tion is not matter. Users can make commerce with

users who are not in the same city or not even in the

same country via those platforms. All these opportu-

nities make those online platforms more attractive and

encourage users spend more time on OSNs platforms.

Nowadays, users are not able control their time

and themselves in OSNs platforms. There are re-

search have been done for analysing users online so-

cial media addiction, for example, the risks of time

distortion was discussed in (Turel et al., 2018). They

ﬁrst differentiated that addiction or time consuming

are not the right terminologies from the psychologi-

cal point, then they agreed that users spend most of

their time on OSNs platforms. There is a study in

which a model was developed to analyse what is the

risk point to understand whether a user is addicted

to OSNs platforms (Monacis et al., 2017). Under-

standing the risk point is not quite easy since each

person has different life perspective and each person

is analysed as a unique case in the psychology (Sk-

aggs, 1945). Based upon the studies on OSNs addic-

tion, many online platforms’ users spend most of their

time on their online accounts. Some online platforms

users accept their addiction to OSNs platforms and

get psychological support to use their time effectively

on their OSNs accounts (Kuss and Grifﬁths, 2011).

Time consuming is not the only concern for

OSNs’ platforms users they are also worried about

their privacy in OSNs. There are privacy policies in

most of OSNs platforms for example Facebook pro-

vides privacy setting to its users for controlling their

data ﬂow (Schechner and Secada, 2019). Some of on-

line platforms’ users do not either even know what is

privacy settings and where do their data go or they

aware of settings but do not know how to use on-

line platforms in a secure frame. Even-though OSNs

platforms service providers provide user privacy set-

tings, users, who adjust their privacy settings, still do

not feel fully secure in online platforms (Ayaburi and

Treku, 2020). Users share photos, videos and texts

which can disclose users’ private information such as

Akkuzu Kaya, G. and Sanders, B.

An Analysis on the Relation between Users’ Online Social Networks Addiction and Users Security Concerns.

DOI: 10.5220/0010565100860092

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B 2021), pages 86-92

ISBN: 978-989-758-527-2

their identity, their addresses, and their locations.

The main concerns of OSNs can be classiﬁed into

two categories; ﬁrst one is privacy concern and sec-

ond is time. This study ﬁrst provides an analysis on

the most popular OSNs platforms based on their daily

active users. It also discusses beneﬁts and drawbacks

of OSNs platforms. Its main aim is to analyse users’

addiction and privacy concerns in OSNs platforms.

In order to achieve its main aim, a questionnaire is

prepared and conducted with online forms. Partici-

pants are active users of various popular social net-

work platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, Insta-

gram, WeChat, and Twitter. This paper answers fol-

lowing research questions;

RQ1: What are the factors to understand whether a

user is indulgent to OSNs or not?

RQ2: Do users trust to OSNs from the security point

of view therefore they share their contents on

OSNs platforms?

The rest of this work is organised as follows; Sec-

tion 2 discusses similar works in the area of online so-

cial networks. The methodological steps and results

of the experiments are given in Section 3. We then

discussed our results in Section 4. Finally, this work

is concluded with future directions in Section 5.

2 RELATED WORKS

2.1 Security Concerns

Threats on OSNs have been addressed by researchers

and industries. OSNs threats are spam, malware,

phishing attacks, spam attacks, cross-site scripting,

click-jacking, de-anonymization attacks, fake pro-

ﬁles, identity clone attacks, information leakage, lo-

cation leakage, cyberstalking, user proﬁling, and

surveillance (Ali et al., 2018). Information leak-

age, location leakage, user proﬁling, and surveillance

could be classiﬁed as modern threats since doing

those attacks does not require a deep knowledge in se-

curity area which makes them much easier than other

attacks.

The impacts of modern attacks in OSNs platforms

open doors to future attacks and/or threats (Molok

et al., 2010). For example, a location leakage might

cause robbery. OSNs platforms users are now per-

mitted share their live locations on their accounts (Li

and Chen, 2010). Let us think a scenario in which a

user shares his live location on his OSNs account and

there is a burglar waits him to be far from his home.

When the burglar sees that the users posts his location

and the shared location shows the users is far from his

home, then the burglar can do burglary. The problem

in here is that users do not know or are not aware that

a content sharing in OSNs might cause serious prob-

lems on their lives. Most of the times users get regret-

ted because they share contents which cause serious

problems on their lives (Wang et al., 2011).

2.2 Time Consuming Concerns

OSNs platforms addiction has been an attractive area

(Andreassen, 2015). Facebook is one of the most

popular OSNs platform, users addiction to Facebook

was discussed in (Guedes et al., 2016). That work’s

results showed that most of people use the Internet

for just using Facebook platform and many users ad-

dicted to Facebook. OSNs addiction is commonly

seen o young people, they are more intolerant than

other users (Enrique et al., 2010).

Users who are addicted to OSN platforms become

a lonely people after a while because they prefer to

communicate with OSNs users rather than their rela-

tives or real-life friends (Yao and Zhong, 2014). An-

dreassen et al. observed that students who are ad-

dicted to OSNs platforms have difﬁculties for con-

centration because they want to spend more time on

OSNs platforms (Andreassen, 2015).

Over use of OSNs platforms cause mental prob-

lems, OSNs users get depressed if they can not con-

trol their times (Pantic, 2014). Aviv et al. worked

on a study which supports studies of OSNs addic-

tion (Weinstein et al., 2015). The study showed that

OSNs cause anxiety on young people, they get anx-

ious if they can not login to their OSNs accounts and

it makes them aggressive.

Above studies worked on OSNs addiction on dif-

ferent age groups and results of OSNs addiction. Dif-

ferent from above studies this work ﬁrst gives factors

which need to be seen in that person to call that person

addicted. Because addiction relates to various fac-

tors not just time. This work then discusses its results

comparatively with similar works in the area of OSNs

addiction.

3 METHOD AND

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

3.1 Participants

A total 1910 participants were recruited mainly from

public. Of these, 898 Turkish (47%), 629 British

(32%), 30 Chinese (1.5%), and 353 (18%) did not

specify their nationalities. The ﬁrst criteria was to

An Analysis on the Relation between Users’ Online Social Networks Addiction and Users Security Concerns

check whether participants are users of any OSNs

platforms. In order to check that, the ﬁrst question

was ”do you have an account an OSNs platform?”,

which was a YES-NO question. If a participant chose

No option, then that questionnaire was not taken into

the consideration for this study.

Participants are classiﬁed based on online social

networks they used. Figure 1 presents ﬁve online so-

cial network platforms and the number of participants

from those online platforms.

Figure 1: The number of participants in different online

platforms.

3.2 Methodological Steps

A questionnaire was prepared for achieving the aim

of this study. All questions in the questionnaire were

multiple choices the reason for this to make users par-

ticipation easier. After preparing the questionnaire,

we disseminated it by using different online plat-

forms such as Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, Twitter,

YouTube, and e-mail service.

Figure 2: Methodological steps of the study.

3.3 Analysis of Experimental Study

We ﬁrst asked participants their ages, this is impor-

tant because it will guide us to answer this study’s re-

search questions. The question on questionnaire was

”Which group of age do you belong to?”. Figure 3

indicates the participants groups and the proportions.

Participants whose ages are between 5-10 and 10-15

use Facebook. This is important because Facebook is

used for educational purpose by teachers and students

(Hew, 2011). Results in Figure 4 can be used as a

support to work in (Hew, 2011). When we analysed

the intersection of the question about participants ages

and their jobs, we saw that participants, whose ages

are between 5-20, are Facebook users. Because, this

age group is also known as studentship ages.

Figure 3: Participants’ ages groups and proportions.

Figure 4: The number of participants who are students.

The next question is related to the number of on-

line social networks accounts that users have and use

actively. Figure 5 presents the result of analysis on

the number of online social accounts that participants

have and use actively. When the details of the par-

ticipants’ answers were zoomed in, YouTube users,

Twitter users, and WeChat users have accounts on

other online social platforms. This might be most

people around the world prefer to use Facebook, In-

stagram, and YouTube. So that the number of users on

those platforms are much more higher than other so-

cial platforms. The purpose of using OSNs platforms

is an important factor for this study. We therefore

asked participants ”which what purpose they use their

OSNs accounts”. Figure 6 shows the results of anal-

ysis on the participants’ purposes to use their OSNs

platforms. Most of participants use their online ac-

counts for enjoying their times. Based on the results,

Facebook is the most used online platform for educa-

tion purpose, this is interesting because YouTube has

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

Figure 5: The number of accounts that participants have and

use actively.

a very good impact on the education for last decades

(Moghavvemi et al., 2018). Although Facebook is

used by teachers and student for educational purpose

(Hew, 2011), it is mostly used and known for enjoy-

ment.

Figure 6: Purposes of users to use their OSNs accounts.

The deﬁnition of addiction was done in (Sinnott-

Armstrong and Pickard, 2013). In that work, if three

of following factors are seen in a person, then it can

be claimed that person is addicted.Those factors are

as follows; 1-) using something more than was in-

tended, 2-) withdrawal, 3-) persistent desire or unsuc-

cessful efforts to control use, 4-) a great deal of time

spent obtaining using, or recovering, 5-)tolerance,6-

) reduction in other important activities because of

use, 7-) continued use despite knowledge of its caus-

ing a persistent or recurrent physical or psychologi-

cal problem. Deﬁning someone as an addicted person

is quite difﬁcult because just one factor among those

seven factors is not enough to call a person addicted.

With the respect of Sinnot et al. deﬁnition on addic-

tion, this term can be expressed with a quantitative

model. Those determinant seven factors can be used

as components of the intended mathematical model.

The order of determinative factors is not important so

that we can use Combination for addiction modelling.

Table 1 show the abbreviation of determinant factors

for addiction are used in the developed quantitative

model.

Table 1: The abbreviation of factors.

Factor abbrevation

More than intended UI

Withdrawal W

Unsuccessful effort to use UC

Time T

Tolerance To

Reduction in other activities R

Cause persistent or recurrent problem P-R P

The addiction is deﬁned by the next expression:

A( f , n) =





f !

n!( f − n)!

where

3 ≤ n ≤ 7

(1)

In Equation 1, A is a function that expresses addicted,

this function depends on f and n. f expresses factors

which are deﬁned in (Sinnott-Armstrong and Pickard,

2013) and n expresses the number of the factors.

This work’s questionnaire had three questions re-

lated to use of time in OSNs platforms, tolerance, re-

duction in other activities. Figure 7 and Figure 8 show

the results of analysis to understand whether partici-

pants are addicted to OSNs platforms or not. We dis-

cussed the results in the light of three factors;

1 Tolerance (To): Participants were asked how they

feel if they can not log into OSNs platforms.

Our analysis showed that almost half of Facebook

users feel aggressive when they can not log into

their online social accounts.

2 Time (T): Amount of time using in OSNs plat-

forms was another question on the questionnaire.

Participants especially have accounts in YouTube,

Facebook, and Instagram spent a great of time on

their OSNs accounts.

3 Reduction in Other Important Activities (R):

Participants were asked ”do they postpone or ig-

nore their works because of spending time on their

OSNs accounts”. Our analysis on that question

showed us Facebook and Instagram users reduce

their work time because they spend more time in

OSNs platforms.

Figure 9 presents the result of analysis on the

factor R: Reduction in other important activities. We

asked users whether they postpone or ignore their

important activities because they are on their OSNs

accounts. Our analysis showed that considerable

amount of participants postpone their important

activities because they prefer being on their online

accounts. Participants also were given questions

related the security point of this study. One was

An Analysis on the Relation between Users’ Online Social Networks Addiction and Users Security Concerns

Figure 7: The amount of time that participants spent in

OSNs platforms.

Figure 8: Tolerance analysis.

Figure 9: Reduction in other important activities analysis.

related to content of data they share on OSNs plat-

forms, Figure 10 presents the result of analysis on

that question. Only participants from Facebook chose

the option ”Almost everything” for the question what

they post to their Facebook accounts.

Figure 11 demonstrates the analysis on the con-

tents that are shared by participants on their OSNs

accounts. The analysis showed that majority of the

participants post photos and videos however there

was eighty-ﬁve participants on Facebook share almost

all their activities on their accounts. The interesting

points was on the intersection of Figure 10 and Figure

11 because participants who post photos, videos, or

everything even if they do not feel secure on OSNs

platforms. For example, some of participants who

chose they post videos and photos on Instagram are

also the ones who chose they feel either insecure or

Figure 10: The result of analysis on the question related

directly to security.

Figure 11: The result of analysis on contents.

very insecure. We asked participants that would they

continue to post their data to OSNs if they know the

contents that they post on OSNs platforms can not be

deleted from the Internet? Figure 12 demonstrates

the results of related the question. 837 participants

chose ”Yes” option. This is quite interesting be-

cause users still are decisive to share their data even if

they leave foot-prints behind them on those platforms.

Figure 12: The result of analysis on awareness 1.

The last question on the questionnaire was related

to that users are more known by OSNs than their rel-

atives. We asked participants how much do they be-

lieve that? In total 1805 participants either Agreed or

Completely Agreed.

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

Figure 13: The result of analysis on awareness 2.

4 DISCUSSION

Today, OSNs platforms are new channels for commu-

nication. Almost everyone has at least one accounts

on popular OSNs accounts, such as, Facebook, Insta-

gram, YouTube, Whats-app, and Twitter.

OSNs users sometimes share their all activities

without considering what they might face from the se-

curity point of view on OSNs platforms (McConnell

et al., 2018). In order to protect users privacy and

protect users data, OSNs platforms create their own

policies (Toch et al., 2010). Users are responsible to

adjust their privacy settings on OSNs platforms which

means that if a user does not know what are privacy

settings or how to manage privacy settings, then there

is no guarantee to have a safe environment on those

platforms. Young people are more eligible to manage

their privacy settings on OSNs platforms while older

people do not even know what security and privacy

means on those platforms (Blank et al., 2014). Users

who do not know security settings and/or privacy set-

tings on OSNs platforms, are more vulnerable to pos-

sible security issues. One of the most common threat

on those platforms is information disclose; users ex-

pose their friends information either intentionally or

unintentionally (Nosko et al., 2010). Location infor-

mation disclosure is an example of information dis-

close and it is a very common threat because OSNs

users like sharing their locations to show others places

which are visited by them (Sun et al., 2015). Location

information disclose is dangerous because it underlies

some burglaries in today’s world. Two questions re-

sults, which are related to security point of this study,

can be discussed together; one asks ”How secure do

you feel on your online social account?” and the other

one asks ”What do you post on your online social net-

works account?”. The total number of participants

who said they feel insecure in OSNs platforms is 561

where 289 are Facebook users, 43 are Twitter users,

146 are Instagram users, 19 are WeChat users, and

64 are YouTube users. The interesting point of those

two questions is on the intersection, participants who

feel insecure in Facebook are the same people who

choose the option ”Almost everything” for the ques-

tion ”What do you post on your online account?”.

Time is the most valuable thing that can not be

taken back in this life. Spending hours in OSNs

platforms are deﬁned an addiction in (Guedes et al.,

2016). Researchers then start working to decrease

time that is spent in OSNs platforms (Esmaeili Rad

and Ahmadi, 2018)(James et al., 2017). It has been

claimed in those research works that if someone

spends more than four hours, then that user can be

called addicted to OSNs platforms. However, spend-

ing an amount of time is not enough to deﬁne a per-

son addicted as it is explained in the previous sections.

Equation 1 expresses the deﬁnition of addicted person

in a quantitative way in which combination of factors

is used. We now look into the details of our results

to see a whether any of our participants is addicted

or not? We then we tried to know how many of the

participants are addicted? To do so, we ﬁrst analysed

all questionnaires from the beginning to ﬁnd out the

number of participants who are in the intersection of

three questions; these questions are ”Do you postpone

or ignore your other works because of spending time

on your online social accounts?”, ”How do you feel

if you can not log in to your online social network

account? ”, and ”How many hours do you spend in

online social network platforms in a day?”.

Figure 14 shows the result of analysis on addic-

tion in this research. Based on the results, 268 partic-

ipants are addicted to OSNs platforms they use. Be-

cause those 268 participants can not tolerate if they

can not log into their OSNs platforms accounts, they

spend more than ﬁve hours on their online accounts,

and they reduce time on their other important activi-

ties because of OSNs platforms use.

Figure 14: The number of addicted participants.

An Analysis on the Relation between Users’ Online Social Networks Addiction and Users Security Concerns

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we give an analysis on OSNs platforms;

one is on users addiction to OSNs and the other one

is users security awareness on those platforms. Be-

fore doing analysis, we clariﬁed addiction meaning

and modelled it in quantitative way. To do anal-

ysis, we disseminated our questionnaires on differ-

ent OSNs platforms for data variety. Our analysis

showed us OSNs users share almost everything on

OSNs platforms without knowing what security is-

sues they might face. The interesting point on the

analysis was that users who share almost all their con-

tents are the same users who are addicted to those

platforms.

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