User concerns about Facebook: Are they important

Previous studies investigated various issues and concerns related to Facebook, but lacks to compare between the importance of these concerns. This study contributes in filling this research gap by (i) consolidating the key issues and concerns and confirming their importance to Facebook users, (ii) examining the relative importance ranking of these issues and concerns, and (iii) answering the question of why people keep using Facebook despite of all the concerns and issues. To fulfil the requirements of the examination, a mixed method research approach was carried out. A Web-based questionnaire was first rolled out on Facebook to solicit the needed responses from its users. The analysis results statistically verified the importance of all the issues and concerns albeit being perceived differently in importance. Privacy concerns were rated the highest among all the issues, whereas issues related to the design aspects were rated the lowest. An open-ended question followed the questionnaire, and the qualitative analysis of its replies confirmed that Facebook is an indispensable global channel of communication that cannot be easily ignored and, with the nonexistence of a better alternative, the benefits of keep using Facebook way overshadow any issues users perceive about it

Vulnerabilities in first-generation RFID-enabled credit cards

Credit cards ; Radio frequency identification systems

Celebryci w skali mikro : lansowanie dzieci w serwisie internetowym YouTube

In the last two decades, we have seen dramatic changes in the concept of fame – from a worldwide star, through a celebrity understood as person who is famous for being famous, to the phenomenon of a microcelebrity. Therefore, the aim of this article is to outline changes in celebrity culture occasioned by the dissemination of digital media platforms such YouTube. This video-sharing platform has profoundly changed the celebrity construction as it has disturbed the balance between the ordinary and the private, and thus contributed to the emergence of many microcelebrities. In this paper, the phenomenon of sharing videos on YouTube in which the characters are children is also highlighted

Understanding Personal Online Reputation Management: A Grounded Theory Study

In our digital and hyperconnected society, social networking sites such as Facebook or Instagram facilitated information sharing in the Web and it becomes an integral part of many people’s daily life. Consequently, the amount of personal data available online is significantly increasing and concurrently, it is easy to find personal data in the Web. As a result of availability and uncomplicated retrieval of published personal data, creating comprehensive online profiles becomes effortless and also eases the derivation of implicit information for various purposes. Such information forms an online reputation and is used to make a judgment about a person (Farmer & Glass 2010). Although first studies show that individuals perceive their online reputation as important (Komisarjevsky 2012), their endeavor to manage their online reputation is on a low level (Brackenbury & Wong 2012; Madden & Smith 2010). In order to understand why individuals consider their online reputation as important but do not take action to manage it we conducted a grounded theory based on 22 qualitative interviews with digital natives to reveal the underlying motivation. Thereby, we contribute a new facet to the general understanding of online reputation management, its obstacles, and explanations for the lack of motivation

Sharing is caring: willingness to share personal data through contact tracing apps in China, Germany, and the US

Are citizens more willing to share private data in (health) crises? We study citizens’ willingness to share personal data through COVID-19 contact tracing apps (CTAs). Based on a cross-national online survey with 6,464 respondents from China, Germany, and the US, we find considerable variation in how and what data respondents are willing to share through CTAs. Drawing on the privacy calculus theory and the trade-off model of privacy and security, we find that during the COVID-19 pandemic, crisis perceptions seem to have only limited influence on people’s willingness to share personal data through CTAs. The findings further show that the data type to be shared determines the suitability of the privacy calculus theory to explain people’s willingness to transfer personal data: the theory can explain the willingness to share sensitive data, but cannot explain the willingness to share less sensitive data

Asymmetrical Power Between Internet Giants and Users in China

We find that the asymmetry of power between the Internet giants and the users, prevalent in the digital era, is deeply problematic in China in that the two key players of big data—the Internet giants and the government—are interested in exploiting the potential of big data, but the regulation of the use and application of user data is an obstacle to their goal. The Internet giants do not value the provision of transparent privacy policies and the enforcement of the policies, while the government, being an investor in and consumer of big data services, is neither interested in nor technologically capable of regulating big data technology. Moreover, there is no unified Internet governance system to solicit cooperation within the government to regulate Internet privacy. These contextual characteristics facilitate the building of the social credit system that pays limited attention to user privacy. The findings suggest that in the discussion about the political consequences of ICT development in China, we should focus on the Internet giants and their unchecked technological power instead of only the governmen

Collateral damage of Facebook third-party applications: a comprehensive study

Third-party applications on Facebook can collect personal data of the users who install them, but also of their friends. This raises serious privacy issues as these friends are not notified by the applications nor by Facebook and they have not given consent. This paper presents a detailed multi-faceted study on the collateral information collection of the applications on Facebook. To investigate the views of the users, we designed a questionnaire and collected the responses of 114 participants. The results show that participants are concerned about the collateral information collection and in particular about the lack of notification and of mechanisms to control the data collection. Based on real data, we compute the likelihood of collateral information collection affecting users: we show that the probability is significant and greater than 80% for popular applications such as TripAdvisor. We also demonstrate that a substantial amount of profile data can be collected by applications, which enables application providers to profile users. To investigate whether collateral information collection is an issue to users’ privacy we analysed the legal framework in light of the General Data Protection Regulation. We provide a detailed analysis of the entities involved and investigate which entity is accountable for the collateral information collection. To provide countermeasures, we propose a privacy dashboard extension that implements privacy scoring computations to enhance transparency toward collateral information collection. Furthermore, we discuss alternative solutions highlighting other countermeasures such as notification and access control mechanisms, cryptographic solutions and application auditing. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that provides a detailed multi-faceted study of this problem and that analyses the threat of user profiling by application providers