Social Networking:
How Social Networking changes our view of privacy
As Social Networking Sites (SNS) in the Internet are faced with an exponential growth, it gets more and more important what kind of personal data users are willing to disclose to get a fully satisfying user-experience in return. These days, many users expect a SNS to allow them to broadcast their thoughts and doings in realtime to all their friends. But that was not always the case; when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook which has currently over 400 million active users (Facebook, 2010), in 2004 invented the status field that allowed the users to make their thoughts public, many people asked him “What is that good for?” and “Why would I like to post my thoughts to the Internet?”. Since then, posting status messages has become normal for Facebook users and most of them would certainly miss that feature. These status messages are in fact nothing else then highly personal data. It is possible to know a person quite well just by reading this persons Facebook wall. But what does it mean when millions of people feel the demand to disclose their personal data to their friends and often to the whole world? Does this mean that they are less concerned about their privacy than people were previously? My research actually shows exactly the opposite of that; Even if people are sharing quite a lot of their private data, it seems that they care rather more about their privacy then in the early days. »Read More
