The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network

Abstract

The rapid growth of contemporary social network sites (SNSs) has coincided with an increasing concern over personal privacy. College students and adolescents routinely provide personal information on profiles that can be viewed by large numbers of unknown people and potentially used in harmful ways. SNSs like Facebook and MySpace allow users to control the privacy level of their profile, thus limiting access to this information. In this paper, we take the preference for privacy itself as our unit of analysis, and analyze the factors that are predictive of a student having a private versus public profile. Drawing upon a new social network dataset based on Facebook, we argue that privacy behavior is an upshot of both social influences and personal incentives. Students are more likely to have a private profile if their friends and roommates have them; women are more likely to have private profiles than are men; and having a private profile is associated with a higher level of online activity. Finally, students who have private versus public profiles are characterized by a unique set of cultural preferences-of which the ''taste for privacy'' may be only a small but integral part.

The effect of social network sites on adolescents' social and academic development: Current theories and controversies

“…Students appear more likely to have a private profile if their friends or roommates also used privacy settings (Lewis, Kaufman, & Christakis, 2008). Such results offer a hypothesis that peer effects influence the safety behaviors of youth online.…”

Technology Adoption by Elderly People – An Empirical Analysis of Adopters and Non-Adopters of Social Networking Sites

“…Such a high number of users could be explained by the variety of SNS possibilities. Each SNS user can communicate with friends or strangers, maintain relationships, enlarge their circle of friends, share private information, collaborate or just have fun ( [24]; [51]; [62]; [65]; [67]; [72]). Due to this, many people integrated social network sites in their daily routine ( [43], [65], [72]) and spend there between 10 minutes and 3 hours every day ( [28]; [68]; [62]).…”

“…Only afterwards, these known people will be added in the online friends list. This behavior is called Offline-to-Online phenomenon and is a distinctive characteristic of Facebook and comparable platforms ( [28]; [51]; [55]; [44]; [65]). …”

“…Apart from that, many people use SNS to share private information like photos or videos or try to enlarge their circle of friends. Others just pursue the aim to collaborate or to have fun while playing online games and compete with friends ( [24]; [51]; [62]; [65]; [67]; [72]). Additionally further SNS (such as Xing or LinkedIn) support the application process of job seekers by providing the possibility to upload CVs, connect with their job network or communicate with recruiters and headhunters for job offers [74].…”

Preference effects on friendship choice: Evidence from an online field experiment

“…SNSs likewise connect individuals in various arenas, such as romance (e.g., Friendster.com), business (e.g., LinkedIn.com), and shared interests (e.g., MySpace.com). The blossoming of SNSs has also triggered academic research in different fields, such as identity construction and expression (Boyd and Heer, 2006), friendship racial homogeneity (Mayer and Puller, 2008;Wimmer and Lewis, 2010), social capital building and maintenance , social grooming (Tufekci, 2008), information disclosure (Gross and Acquisti, 2005), personal profile characteristics , privacy concerns (Gross and Acquisti, 2005;Hodge, 2006;Lewis et al, 2008), user and non-user differences (Hargittai, 2007), and so on. In particular, friendship ties in SNSs, such as Facebook, are especially ideal for testing our two preference dimensions -in-group identity and higher status -on friendship choice.…”