Privacy In Online Social Networking: Social Network Users Perception

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Date: 20 February 2017
Objectives of the Study
The main objective of this study is to measure the perception of social media users with regards to their safety and privacy in using different social media platforms. This also includes the preventive methods that they employ to ensure their safety and privacy. More particularly, this assessment would be done using mixed methods such as questionnaires, surveys, etc. By doing this, the author of this paper believes that this could add to the existing pool of knowledge that could be further used for succeeding researches about the importance of “safe and secure” social media usage.
Privacy in Online Social Networking
Perception of Social Network users
It is no doubt that because of humanity’s knack for innovation, our world today have become much wider, and the lives of every individual more interconnected with one another. To date, it is estimated that there are about 3.17 billion users of the internet, while 2.3 billion of this are “active social media users.” Adding to this, it is also estimated that for every day that passes by, about "1 million more active social media users" are being added to this population (Smith, 2016). Being aware of this fact, it is not surprising how many entities/parties have recognized and battled against these potential dangers that every user faces, especially in terms of their privacy and safety.
Nonetheless, it could still be argued that this battle is a long way from over. Up to these dates, numerous individuals are still being terrorized by “Identity thieves, scam artists, debt collectors, stalkers, and [even] corporations” by using their own information for their own advantage and at the expense of the individual (Pipes, 2010). However, the threat does not end here. In a survey done in 2006 at Princeton University, it is estimated that “One in every 20 teenagers include their full name, their photo, the name of their school and the name of their town in their public profile” completely open for everyone’s consumption (Ndiandukue, 2012). This raises a very immediate concern, according to Ndiandukue (2012), because this could make these teenagers more vulnerable to criminal acts such as pedophilia and rape. Another pressing concern is how easy it is today to gather sensitive information from an individual. In one news article from the Huffington Post, there was even an instance where a Bulgarian Tech Consultant was able to get “1 Million Users’ Private Facebook Data” for only the price of 5usd (Grenoble, 2012). This just shows how vulnerable each social media user is, despite all of the efforts being done to prevent breaches in security and privacy, and thus showing how immediate these concerns are.
As stated earlier, these risks regarding privacy breach and security assurance are one of the most immediate issues today. It is definitely a good thing that government organizations are doing their best to stop these. However, because of all the news stating that even government organizations play a part in this breach of privacy - such as the case of Snowden (Oppenheim, 2013) - the author of this study believes t...