Behaviour and attitudes vs. privacy concerns of social online networks

Abstract

The Online Social Networks (OSNs) are widely used in commercial or personal purposes, including entertainment. The main value of OSNs is in their ability to facilitate and ease communication between end users. They also enable users who are physically remote to maintain relationships and stay up to date with current events. Therefore, the popularity and market potential of different OSNs has been growing over time along with the growth of user engagement and they still continue to increase. The number of network users worldwide reached 2.2 billion as of 2016. The leading social network is Facebook with above 1.5 billion mainly active users worldwide, as of 2016. According to Internet World Stat, 73.5% of the European Union citizens use the Internet on a regular basis, while 51.24% of them use Facebook. In Serbia, 66.20% of the population uses the Internet, but 72.51% of them also use the most popular OSN - Facebook. This data motivated us to conduct a survey which would determine if the OSN users in Serbia have concerns about their privacy. We intend to investigate the relationship between concerns of OSN users and their behaviour and attitudes towards privacy. For that purpose, the online survey is conducted with 641 respondents in Serbia. The behaviour is investigated throughout the groups of questions concerning the habits of using OSNs, leaving real personal data or connecting with unknown people. The attitude is investigated by the questions regarding the opinion about possibility of using personal data by the provider or third party, posting the photos by the friend, data transparency or possibility of customizing network. Privacy concerns are investigated by the Westin Privacy Segmentation Index which divides users into the groups of fundamentalists, pragmatists and unconcerned. We found that largest group of OSN users are Privacy Pragmatists (335), followed by group of Privacy Fundamentalist (283) and smallest group are Privacy Unconcerned (23). Those fundamentalists belong to a group of older ONS users who are mainly concerned for their privacy. The most of them (90.5%) have been, or they are not sure whether they have been, exposed to private data harassment. On the opposite, the unconcerned users are the most flexible group, spending a lot of time on OSNs, concerning that their data have not been exposed in 69.6%.