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2.4 Previous research on users’ privacy management on Facebook
Due to its great number of audience, Facebook had become a subject of interests in many fields. In a comprehensive literature search by Wilson et al. (2012), 412 journal articles regarding Facebook were reviewed. Among them, five categories of research were identified as the following: descriptive analysis of users, motivations for using Facebook, identity presentation, the role of Facebook in social interactions, and privacy and information disclosure. Among them, the literature on privacy and information disclosure only accounted for 18% of the articles collected. For the purpose of this study, the following section would review previous research on users’ privacy management on Facebook.
According to the current policy on Facebook, the only information necessary to sign up for a Facebook account would be the users’ name, gender and email address. Other than that, users had the liberty to choose whether or not to provide additional information. On users’
profiles, there were many pieces of information that can be showcased. For instance, users could disclose contact information, educational backgrounds, family and interpersonal relationships, as well as their interests and the content they posted. Basically, users were given the options to choose either to share their information with the public, with friends, with friends but not acquaintances or just to themselves. As one can see, users could also choose not to provide the information at all, in which it would be the most private option available right now. In addition to the privacy settings, research has also found that users would employ privacy protection strategies through removing, deleting and un-tagging unwanted content about themselves (Madden & Smith, 2010; Madden, 2012).
In terms of predicting Facebook users’ boundary management on Facebook, results from previous research showed that different uses of social media (such as social interaction, social browsing, and entertainment) could be an influence to how an individual manage his privacy online. In addition, users’ personalities as well as privacy literacy and concern about privacy also showed significant influences (Liu et al., 2014). In fact, a number of empirical studies
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had indicated that there were several factors that would influence users’ privacy settings on Facebook. For instance, gender (Stutzman & Kramer-Duffield, 2010), users’ attitudes toward privacy protection (Christofides et al., 2009), awareness of privacy protection (Dey et al., 2012), privacy concerns (Acquisti & Gross, 2006; Stutzman & Kramer-Duffield, 2010;
Tufekci, 2008), and perceived likelihood of a privacy violation (Krasnova, Kolesnikova, &
Guenther, 2009). Keeping that in mind, this thesis would look at how different factors in boundary development, boundary coordination and boundary turbulence would predict users’
privacy management.
According to West & Turner (2007), boundary development was guided by people's decision criteria for revealing or concealing private information. In terms of users’ boundary management on Facebook, Stutzman & Kramer-Duffield (2010) identified in their study a range of factors associated with privacy behavior on Facebook. Particularly, they found that gender, network size, weak tie expectance violations and increasing levels of interpersonal privacy practices were associated with having a friends-only Facebook profile. Among them, gender difference was proven to be a factor in users’ privacy practice. Stutzman et al. (2011) also found that male tended to disclose more than female. More recently, according to the latest research by PEW Internet, privacy control on social networking sites was prevalent.
Madden (2012) wrote that whilst a majority (58%) of social network site users restricted access to their profiles, women were significantly more likely to choose private settings than public. Women who maintained social media profiles were also more likely than men to keep their profiles private. In addition, two-thirds of online adults had a profile on a social networking site, while most of them restricted the access of those profiles to friends only.
Moreover, Dey et al. (2012) found that there was a gender difference in how private users were. Therefore, this study proposed the first set of hypotheses in regard to gender as the following:
H1a: Female Taiwanese users are more likely to have stricter profile settings than male.
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H1b: Female Taiwanese users will use privacy protection strategies more frequently than male.
In addition to the gender difference, Madden & Smith (2010) also found that users between 18-29 years of age were more likely to actively restrict access to the information they shared. They were more likely to change their privacy settings, delete unwanted comments or remove their names from photos when compared to other age groups. Another study also found that young and middle aged people tended to be more private than older users (Dey et al., 2012). It was apparent that demographics such as gender and age may be underlying factors that contributed to how individuals managed their privacy on Facebook.
This thesis thus proposed the second set of hypotheses in regard to age as the following:
H2a: The younger the users are, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H2b: The younger the users are, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
On the other hand, the amount of time users spent on Facebook may contribute to the data they provided to the social networking site (Debatin et al., 2009; Madden & Smith, 2010). In a study conducted by Stutzman et al. (2012), it was conveyed that Facebook users in their survey data sets did exhibit increasingly privacy-seeking behavior. However, policy and interface changes by Facebook could also alter the outcome and countered the privacy-seeking behavior. Anyhow, over time, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed to their friends did increase. Users’ years of using Facebook and average hours per day spent on Facebook may also be an influence to how they coordinated their boundary. Therefore, this thesis proposed the fourth set of hypotheses as the following, H3a: The more time the users spend on Facebook, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H3b: The more time the users spend on Facebook, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
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While Petronio (2002, 2007) had established that privacy management was a rule-based system, there were many factors that may influence one’s decision in terms of boundaries were coordinated. As Hesse & Rauscher (2013) pointed out, individuals’ personal privacy orientations were also believed to play a role in determining users’ privacy tendencies, namely the revealing and concealing of personal information in an online environment.
Having considered the research framework of this thesis, in which users in Taiwan would be the main subject of interests, the third set of hypotheses were as the following,
H4a: The more privacy-oriented the users are, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H4b: The more privacy-oriented the users are, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
Meanwhile, users’ knowledge toward the privacy policy on Facebook may also play a role in determining users’ privacy management. Butler et al. (2011) suggested from their research that it also required adequate knowledge regarding Facebook’s privacy policy as well as how Facebook utilized the user information in order to know how to manage the boundary accordingly. Furthermore, according to Ou (2011), it was important to look at how users actually understood the current privacy policy in order to determine how it may affect users’ decisions to carry out privacy management. Therefore, the thesis proposed the fifth set of hypotheses as the following,
H5a: The more knowledgeable the users are toward Facebook’s privacy policy, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H5b: The more knowledgeable the users are toward Facebook’s privacy policy, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
Having considered the CPM theory proposed by Petronio (2002, 2007), boundary turbulence such as the disruption or violation of one’s privacy could result in the decrease in the individuals’ trust in disclosing privacy information. In fact, Madden (2012) suggested that while users could manage the content that others posted about them, around 11% of social
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networking site users posted content they regretted What that meant was that one in ten profile owners actually voiced regrets about their own posts. Negative experience associated with Facebook such as having their accounts taken over could be perceived as boundary turbulence since it disrupted the original order in the boundary. Young & Quan-Hasse (2013) also found that negative social consequences would lead to users’ change in their privacy management. Therefore, this thesis proposed sixth set of hypotheses below.
H6a: The more negative experiences the users have on Facebook, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H6b: The more negative experiences the users have on Facebook, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
Stutzman et al. (2011) investigated into factors mediating disclosure in social network sites. In their study, they found that people who had greater concern about privacy would disclose less information on Facebook. Hence there was a negative relationship between concerns with privacy and disclosure of information. Secondly, people who had greater concern about privacy would be more likely to engage in privacy protecting behaviors by changing default setting or customizing which friends could see the content. Therefore, the study proposed the seventh set of hypotheses as the following,
H7a: The more privacy concerns the users have on Facebook, the stricter the profile privacy settings.
H7b: The more privacy concerns the users have on Facebook, the more frequently they will use privacy protection strategies.
As detailed before, users’ privacy management was composed of boundary development, boundary coordination and boundary turbulence. As an outcome, users could choose to manage their privacy through profile privacy settings and privacy protection strategies. In an online survey questionnaire to 119 college students from a Midwestern university in the U.S.A., Debatin et al. (2009) found that most users tended to decrease profile visibility
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through restricting access to friends in order to protect their privacy. Though this was the most common strategy for privacy management at the time, the researchers also suggested that it was a very weak mechanism since it was “a quick fix rather than a systematic approach to protecting privacy” (p. 103). The survey findings also indicated that while the majority of Facebook users reported having an knowledge toward privacy settings and make use of their privacy settings, users they may have a skewed sense of what that exactly entails.
Most users were not aware of the fact that restricting access to their data did not mean they are well-protected (Debatin et al., 2009; Madden & Smith, 2010).
With the growing concerns over user’s privacy on social networking sites like Facebook, previous research indicated how users were protecting their privacy online. According to Boyd (2008, p. 18), “most of the times users’ protection of privacy on Facebook [was] social, not structural.” According to Raynes-Goldie (2010), social privacy was defined as the control of information flow about how and when personal information was shared with other people, and access of personal identifiable information and user information by social networking sites and other third parties as institutional privacy. Most studies found that users often chose to alter the privacy settings available to them to protect their privacy from social contacts (Kramer-Duffield, 2010; Stutzman, Gross, & Acquisti, 2012). Moreover, Madden (2012) summarized that it had become a norm for people to opt out of the default setting on Facebook and used restricted access for most of their content. In addition, users’ privacy management also included “profile ‘pruning’”. Profile pruning referred to the deletion of unwanted content by users on their profiles as part of their reputation management.
More recently, Young & Quan-Hasse (2013) described online privacy protection in terms of social strategies and structural strategies. They found that privacy protection strategies were used primarily to guard against social privacy threats and consisted of excluding contact information, using the limited profile option, un-tagging and removing photographs, and limiting Friendship requests from strangers. Apparently, these means of
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privacy management mostly geared toward users’ social privacy, rather than institutional privacy. Therefore, this thesis also proposed the following research question,
RQ 1: Are Taiwanese Facebook users more likely to mitigate social privacy concerns rather than institutional privacy concerns?
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CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY
Given the prevalence of Facebook in Taiwan along with increasing privacy concerns proven evident in previous research, this thesis utilized Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory as the theoretical framework to see how Facebook users in Taiwan managed their privacy on this particular social networking site. Since Facebook was noted as a suitable place to observe naturalistic behavior, this thesis would also employ the survey technique to collect data from active Facebook users in Taiwan. According to Wimmer & Dominick (2011, p. 185), there were several advantages of survey research, detailed the following: (1) this method was often used to investigate problems in realistic settings, (2) large amount of data could be generated with relative ease, (3) the cost for conducting survey research was reasonable, having considered the amount of data collected, and (4) it was not limited by the geographic constraint. Prior to the prevalence of Internet, survey research was often conducted via telephone landlines or cellphones. However, it was much easier to conduct online survey nowadays. Since the topic of this thesis aimed at predicting users’ privacy management via profile privacy settings and privacy protection strategies on Facebook, an online survey approach was deemed reasonable.
However, one main issue with online survey was the low response rate due to the lack of incentives for participants. To overcome the problem of incentivizing respondents, the study used an online survey to approach Facebook users via InsightXplorer, a marketing research firm targeted at respondents in Taiwan. The survey questionnaire was distributed to active daily Facebook user in Taiwan, in which the respondents would receive points for monetary exchange provided by InsightXplorer. In the survey, respondents were inquired into their demographic information, years of using Facebook and average hours per day on Facebook, personal privacy orientation, negative experiences on Facebook, privacy concern and current settings on their profiles on Facebook. Also, the questionnaire contained questions regarding users’ privacy protection strategies. After the data collection, this thesis performed a
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hierarchical linear regression to see how different factors predicted users’ strictness of privacy settings on profiles and the frequency of using privacy protection strategies.