%0 Journal Article
%T USERS¡¯ PERCEPTIONS ON FACEBOOK¡¯S PRIVACY POLICIES
%A Zainab Asif
%A Mamuna Khan
%J ARPN Journal of Systems and Software
%D 2012
%I ARPN Publishers
%X SNS are becoming increasingly popular in almost every age group. People are willing to get socially connected to friends, colleagues, coworkers, family members, groups, natives and even to people whom they are not on familiar terms with.This intensifying popularity of social networking sites and people¡¯s enthusiasm and involvement towards them is giving rise to many security concerns. As people share everything and anything on these sites, they themselves are risking the odds.Generally, social networking sites have privacy policies that users¡¯ can configure as per requirement of each resource. These privacy policies contain all the vital and crucial information that users might need to be aware of prior to sharing their information. Unawareness of these privacy policies and settings results in exposure of users¡¯ private data. Our research presents the study that people are ignorant of such privacy policies and settings, and even if they are conscious and they¡¯ve read them, they hardly understand their effect. We have focused on Facebook¡¯s privacy issues and their impact because its participants are dramatically growing. It defines privacy either as a private/public contrast or in terms of a network of ¡°friends¡±, in which all ¡°friends¡± are created equal and all relationships are reciprocal. It does not provide any mechanisms to specify the users¡¯ privacy preferences for the usage done by third party applications on their personal data.We argue that even the computer science graduates have least idea regarding information disclosure by Facebook. To support our argument, we have conducted a survey which is rooted on minimal understanding of loosely defined privacy policies and settings of Facebook. For this, we have composed and evaluated a set of hypothesis that is conceived on the basis of Facebook¡¯s privacy policies and settings and by observing various Facebook profiles. The survey participants selected, are between the age group of 18 to 32 and are categorized as either computer graduates or general students. We have selected this set of population, because it is considered that they have the most knowledge pertaining to information technology and its practices.We have also contributed few suggestions on privacy policies for new users by exploring knowledge of existing policies. The objectives of this research are twofold: (1) To study the amount and type of information disclosed by Facebook, its consented parties and other Facebook users (2) To compare our findings with regard to the hypothesis that creates a foundation as to why people do not proper
%K Social Networking Sites (SNS)
%K Facebook's privacy settings and policies.
%U http://scientific-journals.org/journalofsystemsandsoftware/archive/vol2no3/vol2no3_6.pdf