Privacy and Security Concern of Online Social Networks from User Perspective

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.