Analysis and Evaluation of Privacy Issues in Online Social Networks
Keywords:
Information and Communication Technologies, Online Social Networks, Social Inclusion and Cohesion Enabling Approaches, Privacy, Facebook, Trust ManagementAbstract
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly becoming popular tools for social interactions despite the prevailing ambivalence towards them. The issue of privacy is a key concern due to increasing popularity and immense growth in the volume of online data exchange between OSN users. There is a need to realize and deal with the social consequences of confession of unwanted information to unintended audiences. Despite information disclosure, the issue is more problematic due to a lack of privacy knowledge and related privacy risks on behalf of the users. The core idea of this research is to come up with comprehensive guidelines for protection against unintended information disclosure via OSNs. Although the users can tweak privacy settings related to different information items/categories, authors hypothesize that the complexity of managing privacy settings, accompanied by increasingly negligent default settings, leads to unintended information disclosure.