Privacy paradox or bargained-for-exchange : capturing the relationships among privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital

textThe dissertation seeks to bridge the gap between privacy and social capital on SNS use by bringing the essential elements of social networking, privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital together to examine their complex relationships and the daily challenges every SNS user faces. The major purposes of this dissertation were to revisit the privacy paradox phenomenon, update the current relationships among privacy concerns, self-disclosure, and social capital on Facebook, integrate these relationships into a quantitative model, and explore the role of privacy management in these relationships. The goal was realized by using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to test a theoretical model that used survey data from 522 respondents. The findings from the dissertation show the impact of the structural factor—Facebook social network intensity and diversity—and the impact of individuals’ self-disclosure on Facebook on their perceived bridging and bonding social capital. This dissertation employed various measurements of key variables to update the current status of the privacy paradox phenomenon—the disconnection between privacy concerns and self- disclosure on social media—and found the break of the traditional privacy paradox and the existence of the social privacy paradox. Findings also show that private information about personal information, thoughts, and ideas shared on Facebook become assets in using Facebook and accumulating social capital. Meanwhile, higher privacy concerns reduce the level of self-disclosure on Facebook. Therefore, privacy concerns become a barrier in Facebook use and in accumulating social capital within these networks. This dissertation further examined the mediating role of privacy management to solve the dilemma. Findings confirmed that privacy management is important in redirecting the relationships among privacy concerns, self-disclosure, and social capital. People who have higher privacy concerns tend to disclose fewer personal thoughts and ideas on Facebook and miss the opportunity to accumulate social capital. However, when they employ more privacy management strategies, they are more willing to self-disclose and thus accumulate more social capital on Facebook networks. Lastly, the proposed integrated model examined through SEM analysis confirms the delicate relationships among the social networking characteristics, privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital.Journalis

Understanding privacy leakage concerns in Facebook: A longitudinal case study

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis focuses on examining users’ perceptions of privacy leakage in Facebook – the world’s largest and most popular social network site (SNS). The global popularity of this SNS offers a hugely tempting resource for organisations engaged in online business. The personal data willingly shared between online friends’ networks intuitively appears to be a natural extension of current advertising strategies such as word-of-mouth and viral marketing. Therefore organisations are increasingly adopting innovative ways to exploit the detail-rich personal data of SNS users for business marketing. However, commercial use of such personal information has provoked outrage amongst Facebook users and has radically highlighted the issue of privacy leakage. To date, little is known about how SNS users perceive such leakage of privacy. So a greater understanding of the form and nature of SNS users’ concerns about privacy leakage would contribute to the current literature as well as help to formulate best practice guidelines for organisations. Given the fluid, context-dependent and temporal nature of privacy, a longitudinal case study representing the launch of Facebook’s social Ads programme was conducted to investigate the phenomenon of privacy leakage within its real-life setting. A qualitative user blogs commentary was collected between November 2007 and December 2010 during the two-stage launch of the social Ads programme. Grounded theory data analysis procedures were used to analyse users’ blog postings. The resulting taxonomy shows that business integrity, user control, transparency, data protection breaches, automatic information broadcast and information leak are the core privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users. Privacy leakage concerns suggest three limits, or levels: organisational, user and legal, which provide the basis to understanding the nature and scope of the exploitation of SNS users’ data for commercial purposes. The case study reported herein is novel, as existing empirical research has not identified and analysed privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users

The value of privacy: concerns, attitudes, behaviors online, and information protection measures

2012 - 2013Most of our lives takes place on-line. Our on-line activities, affect directly or indirectly the way other people perceive us. One have to careful decide what to expose and what not. There are a lot of personal and sensitive information that people could unintentionally disclose. Indeed an enormous amount of data is being generated and can be disclosed by an increasing number of people on the Web, often without know who is recording what about them. The odds of being tracked without full acknowledge is growing mainly because of two reasons: the exorbitant number of company in the behavioral advertising field and a market overfilled with free services to attract users. This thesis focus on the study of the value of privacy, as intended by people. Learning the value of privacy is of great importance. How people value their own privacy affects the way relationships among individuals are created and maintained. Not only, it have implications on how an individual relates himself with the world, it influences user behaviors and attitudes. The mechanisms responsible for how people value their own privacy are bounded to the perception of risks and perceived level of fairness of the outside world. That component is the awareness. The way an individual perceives the risks around him/her, represent one of the big challenge in order to fully understand the way people value their privacy. A better understand of those mechanisms and an increased awareness will help to design and build privacy by design systems. Increased awareness can help users to understand how and why their privacy is mined, and to become more informed about what silently happens during their navigation. Learning from disclosure of personal information may help to discriminate potential harmful activities from daily and regular activities that can be performed. Awareness could help people to make informed decision about privacy online, and adopt countermeasures if necessary. Protecting users on-line from privacy risks is a difficult task. Task made even more difficult by users’ attitudes. Users are not fully aware of the risks of privacy leaks, even after the increasingly number of press reports about privacy leakage and personal information disclosure on the Web. They ignore that their data can be collected, aggregated and linked with ambient information for various purposes. Anyway, even if awareness is not the only mechanism involved in evaluating privacy, it can be used to study if a privacy tool can help users to make informed decision to reduce their exposure while on the Web. To this aim, we conducted a study to analyze general perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about privacy online, with a focus on the mutual influence with users skills. We discovered mechanisms responsible for how a person value its own privacy: a) skills influence the perception of privacy risks b) privacy is worth the price if it is a side effect of another well-recognized benefit. [edited by author]XII n.s

Understanding and Measuring Privacy and Security Assertions of Mobile and VR Applications

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed a profound transformation in the way mobile applications are utilised and engaged with by consumers. There has been a noticeable surge in people relying on applications for various purposes such as entertainment, remote work, and daily activities. These services collect large amounts of users’ personal information and use them in many areas, such as in medical and financial systems, but they also pose an unprecedented threat to users’ privacy and security. Many international jurisdictions have enacted privacy laws and regulations to restrict the behaviour of apps and define the obligations of app developers. Although various privacy assertions are required in app stores, such as the permission list and the privacy policies, it is usually difficult for regular users to understand the potential threats the app may pose, let alone identify undesired or malicious application behaviours. In this thesis, I have developed a comprehensive framework to assess the current privacy practices of mobile applications. The framework first establishes a knowledge base (including datasets) to model privacy and security assertions. It then builds a sound evaluation system to analyse the privacy practices of mobile applications. Large-scale privacy evaluations were conducted on different realworld datasets, including privacy policies, contact tracing apps, and children’s apps, with the aim of revealing the risks associated with mobile application privacy. Lastly, a novel approach to applying differential privacy on streamed spatial data in VR applications is proposed. This thesis provides a comprehensive guideline for the mobile software industry and legislators to build a stronger and safer privacy ecosystem.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, 202

Exploring Personal Information Disclosure and Protective Behaviour of Research Scholars’ when Seeking Information from the Web.

The collection of personal information became the most prominent threat associated with information consumption from the web. Existing research has not explored the information disclosure and protective behaviour of PhD research scholars. This investigation aimed to address the following objectives: (1) To find the Information-Seeking Behaviours of research scholars (2) To explore the research scholars’ attitudes towards personal information disclosure (3) To explore the protective behaviours of research scholars’ towards personal information disclosure. The study aims to contribute to existing knowledge in information disclosure behaviour and protective behaviour. The empirical research consists of thirty (30) PhD research scholars from the Department of Library and Information Science; Economics and Commerce of North-Eastern Hill University. These scholars’ were selected using a convenient sampling technique to get a prompt response. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse the data. The results showed that research scholar’s information need on research topic accounted to (60%) daily and used the Internet daily. The findings showed that most research scholars’ do not trust the website and consider their personal information as unsafe on the web. Most of them reported having refused to give their personal identifiable information while considerable percentages are unfamiliar with the privacy emerging technologies (Example: Tor browser, Remove malware/Spyware, cookies, anonymous browsing, etc.). This study provides guidelines for the research scholars’ to protect their personal information, thus, preventing scholars from privacy risks. The study contributes new knowledge concerning privacy concerns thus, broadened the context of personal disclosure in the online scenario