SummaryUsers share a wide variety of information on Facebook, but are users aware of the privacy implications of this?
Govani & Pashley examined how Facebook affects privacy, and found serious flaws in the system. Privacy on Facebook is undermined by three principal factors: users disclose too much, Facebook does not take adequate steps to protect user privacy, and third parties are actively seeking out end-user information using Facebook.
Facebook (www.facebook.com) is one of the foremost social networking websites, with over 8 million users spanning 2,000 college campuses. With this much detailed information arranged uniformly and combined into one place, there are bound to be risks to privacy.
Users may submit their data without being aware that it may be shared with advertisers.
Third parties may build a database of Facebook data to sell. Intruders may steal passwords, or entire databases, from Facebook.
Govani & Pashley undertook several steps to investigate these privacy risks. Their goal was to analyze the extent of disclosure of data, then to analyze the steps that the system took to protect that data. Finally, then they conducted a ‘’threat model" analysis to investigate ways in which these factors could produce unwanted disclosure of private data. Their analysis found that Facebook was entrenched in college students' lives, but users had not restricted who had access to this.
In the past, others have utilized Facebook's use of predictable, easy to understand URLs to automatically request information and save user information for further analysis.
In general, they were able to collect large numbers of user profiles from Facebook using their information collection system. Govani & Pashley exhaustively downloaded every profile available at their four subject schools,
From the results they obtained they found that overall, the majority of students were aware
of the ability to restrict the amount of information they provided to different Facebook users. While 40% of users did restrict some of their information, there are still large numbers of users that are sharing very personal information like mobile phone numbers and home addresses. The overall affect of the survey seemed to be minimal. From the surveys they concluded that Facebook users generally feel comfortable sharing their personal information in a campus environment.
Participants said that they “had nothing to hide” and “they don’t really care if other people see their information.” These attitudes and behaviours change by merely asking students to take a survey, no matter how informational it is. This irrational trust and comfort of facebook seems prevalent across the board.
Link to the full article; http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:2a5zkCFDafwJ:scholar.google.com/+facebook&hl=en&as_sdt=2000
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