The Cost of Using Facebook: Assigning Value to Privacy Protection on Social Network Sites Against Data Mining, Identity Theft, and Social Conflict

Abstract

By making use of SNSs, users expose themselves to several potential privacy threats at once, yet little is known in how SNSs users of various ages prioritize their concerns over these different privacy threats. This study makes use of an innovative method will be used to determine the relative importance attributed by SNS users to the protection against three distinct privacy threats they face on SNSs: data mining, identity theft, and social conflict. The results show that even respondents as young as twelve years old appear still attribute most importance to their privacy protection against data mining. Furthermore, the results suggests that respondents generally seek privacy protection that is good enough, avoiding the most obvious privacy violations, as opposed to trying to obtain the best privacy protection. These findings, when considering that participation on SNSs in not necessarily a completely free choice and users generally have little choice or input in their actual privacy protection once participating, indicate that the development of policies to regulate and safeguard SNSs users privacy online may be of prime importance.