Impact of Privacy Attitude, Concern and Awareness on Use of Online Social Networking

Dr. Sanjeev Dhawan, Dr. Kulvinder Singh Faculty of Computer Science & Engineering

U.I.E.T, Kurukshetra University Haryana, India

rsdhawan@rediffmail.com,kshanda@rediffmail.com

Ms. Shivi Goel M.Tech. (Computer Engineering) Research Scholar

U.I.E.T, Kurukshetra University Haryana, India

shivigoel12@gmail.com

Abstract— online social networking has extended the boundaries of social communication. Now everybody can share their personal stuffs, feelings and relations even on internet too. Although it provides an ease of communication but on the other side this online interaction has created a pool of wide information which can be easily achieved and can be misused. These Online Social Networks offer security, and privacy mechanisms to protect users’ sensitive information from undesired accesses but still these rules are violated as users are not fully aware about the risks and their preventions. The main purpose of this analysis is to examine the affect of privacy issues on usage trends of social networking sites. This paper explains the impact of gender, age and profession of user on attitude and awareness and in turn behavior of social network users. A research model is developed which is based on proposed hypothesis. This research model has been confirmed through data collected from 400 social networking site users through online survey based on questionnaire, and the analysis results provide support to the model.

Keywords— social networking sites, theory of planned behavior

I. INTRODUCTION With the emergence of social networking sites, the rules

and definitions of social interaction has been totally changed. This beginning of new era was all started back at 2002 with the successful launch of Friendster which then followed by Myspace and LinkedIn a year later. Facebook launched in 2004, and now become the most popular site in the world [1]. According to rough statistics as on September 2013 [2], Facebook has 727 million daily active users on average. The phenomenon of social interactions on social networking sites does not limits itself to just teenagers looking for more popularity or to introvert people to get more friends. This platform encourages people belonging to any demographic or to any age group by providing them an open medium to enrich their lives with the experience of hurdle free communication and even for marketing and advertisements their products too.

As people can easily interact with others using social media, they unknowingly disclose more personal information which they really not used to do. But it provides a huge amount of personal data to malicious user which can be misused against the user‘s will. As people of every age group, educational background and demographic today use social networking site, current study focuses on how social

networking site users deal with this growing risk of security. This paper focuses on the study of usage trends of these online social networking sites, user’s attitude towards privacy and security and to develop an understanding of the individual’s risk taking behavior particularly around the issue of sensitive information revelation. Rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section II discusses related work done in this field. Section III defines the proposed research model and hypothesis. Section IV discusses the methodology implemented in this work. Section V discusses the results of data analysis. Section VI discusses the results. Section VII concludes the work while defining the limitations of the work.

II. RELATED WORK In order to study user’s behavior and impact of various

hedonic utilities provided by social networks, several surveys based research work has been done. Gross et al. quantified individual‘s willingness to provide a large amount of personal data and justified that the role of peer pressure, herding behavior, myopic privacy attitude, sense of protection offered by SNS supports the information revelation behavior of users and their willingness expose them to various physical and cyber risks [3]. several researchers had worked on and demonstrated that how hedonic utilities like self esteem [4], self efficacy [5], perceived enjoyment [6], perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness [7] and perceived security, privacy and concern [8] exposed users to various cyber attacks on online social networks. How different nationalities affect the trend of user adoption of SNS is investigated by Veltri et al. which specially focused on Morocco and U.S. users [9]. Even Phippen et al. also statistically shown that people usually disclose potentially harmful information to strangers on social networking sites then they actually do in real [10].

The factors that drive students to use SNS are explored by Cheung et al. [11]. It has been shown that students intentionally share personal data online and it demonstrated that social presence of a student can be used to determine the usage trend on his SNS. Facebook popularity was justified by, Purcell et al. who demonstrated that the impact of Facebook is more than Twitter on teens [12]. Many researchers like Lin et al. suggested that enjoyment has stronger significant role in people‘s continued use of SNS [13]. It also demonstrated that gender makes a notable difference with respect to the behavior online and suggested that women do enjoy mush popularity

14978-1-4799-4236-7/14/$31.00 c©2014 IEEE

and widespread social presence. Tsoi et al. presented that people from different demographics behave differently on same SNS with same privacy concerns and implied that cultural differences create a difference on usage behavior of user [14]. Age also made a significant impact on usage trend of online social networking sites demonstrated by Quinn et al. [15]. Several research models based on effects of hedonic utilities on usage behavior were also proposed and justified, [16]. Elaborated study of personality and its effects on social media is demonstrated by Correa et al. [17]. Also user’s online behavior from different perceptive was studied by Jin et al. [18].

III. RESEARCH FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES Several theoretical models have been proposed and tested

in the past to understand the impact of privacy concerns on user behavior in social networking site. Drawing upon theory of planned behavior, framework for finding the willingness of sharing information and individual’s risk taking behavior in social networking sites is proposed as represented in Fig.1. The theory of planned behavior [19] suggests that a person’s behavior can be determined by his/her intention. Following research model is particularly interested in whether certain factors like profession, attitude, privacy concern, age, gender and awareness can predict the risk taking behavior of an individual on social networking sites.

A. Proposed Hypothesis The proposed hypothesis aims to find impact of

individual’s details, privacy concern, attitude, and awareness on their willingness to share personal information in social networking sites as mentioned in table I.

Fig.1. Proposed research model

TABLE I. LIST OF PROPOSED HYPOTHESIS

H# HypothesisH1 Men are less concerned about their online privacy than

women H2 Women are more active on SNSs than menH3 Teenagers spend more time online than adultsH4 Adults are more concerned about their online privacy than

teenagers H5 Students spend more time online than othersH6 Students are more aware of privacy concerns than othersH7 Individuals who are concerned more about their privacy and

took privacy issue more seriously (attitude) are more aware of their online interaction than the less concerned individuals.

IV. METHODOLOGY

A. Data Collection Data were collected by conducting an online customized

questionnaire survey of social networking sites user's, to test proposed research framework. In total 400 responses were collected. All items of proposed research framework were measured on a four-point likert scale.

B. Tool and Methods In order to validate the model and hypothesis, SPSS

statistics 20 is used. Independent t-test: The independent t-test was used to test for a (significant) difference(s) between two independent groups (like males and females) on the means of a continuous variable. Analysis of variance (ANOVA): One-way between-groups ANOVA was used in case of one independent (grouping) variable with three or more levels (groups) and on dependent continuous variable. Regression analyses: With regression analysis it is possible to test the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables [20]. A reliability test was conducted to test the internal consistency or reliability of the scales (e.g. privacy concern, privacy awareness). The output of a reliability test is a Cronbach alpha value. A Cronbach alpha value of 0.70 was required to use a “scale” for analyses. For all tests, a p-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

V. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS In order to test the reliability of data, value of Cronbach

alpha is computed as shown in table II. With value more than 0.80 for all three constructs, the data is statistically found reliable.

TABLE II. VALUE OF CRONBACH ALPHA

Principal Constructs No. of items Cronbach alpha value

Privacy_concern 5 .900 Privacy_attitude 4 .891 Audience_awareness 4 .857

For testing H1 and H2 which include only 2 groups that is men or women, Independent t test is performed. Results are as shown in table III and can be written as “A t test passed to reveal a statistically reliable difference between mean number of women and men on their usage frequency of social

2014 5th International Conference- Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence) 15

networking sites, t (398) = -2.579, p= 0.01, but failed to reveal statistically reliable difference on concern level regarding privacy issues on SNS of both women and men, t (398) = -1.490, p=0.137. Hence H1 is rejected but H2 is supported as shown.

TABLE III. RESULT OF INDEPENDENT T TEST

H# df t value p value Status H1 398 -1.490 0.137 rejected H2 398 -2.579 0.01 accepted

In case of more than two groups ANOVA test is performed. Result of ANOVA test is as shown in table IV. For H3-H6 one way ANOVA is performed while for H7 two way ANOVA is performed. It can be analyzed by the p values that H3, H5, H6 and H7 are supported but H4 does not.

TABLE IV. RESULTS OF ONE WAY AND TWO WAY ANOVA TEST

H# Mean(SD) F value p value Status H3

teens young adults

adults

2.10(0.955) 1.92(0.803) 1.00(1.008)

33.378

0.001

accepted

H4 teens

young adults adults

2.90(1.01) 3.16(.894) 2.97(1.08)

2.159

0.117

rejected

H5 student

professional other

1.93(0.859) 1.56(0.967) 2.20(0.768)

9.823

0.000

accepted

H6 student

professional other

3.00(0.973) 3.20(0.923) 3.44(0.556)

3.657

0.027

accepted

H7 5.874 0.016 accepted

In order to validate the research model, multiple regression analysis is performed. There are three dependent variables i.e. privacy_attitude, privacy_concern and audience_awareness. These three independent variables are linked with three independent variables i.e. profession, age and gender. Table V reflects the relationship of these independent variables with dependent privacy_attitude. As p value for whole is 0.02, as whole it is satisfied, but only profession of user makes a significant impact on the attitude of users. Also as b value for age is negative, it can be said that increase in age results in decrease of desired attitude.

Table VI reflects the relationship of these independent variables with dependent privacy_concern. As p value for whole is 0.014, as whole it is satisfied, but here also only profession makes a significant impact on level of concern of user with p value 0.007. Here also age have negative impact, as age of user increases, the level of concern decreases. This may be due to less awareness of the privacy policies as reflected in table 7. Table VII reflects the relationship of these independent

variables with dependent audience_awareness. As p value for whole is 0.019, as whole it is satisfied. Here statistically shown that gender of user also has considerable impact on the awareness level on privacy issues.

TABLE V. MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS WITH PRIVACY_ATTITUDE AS DEPENDENT VARIABLE

b p value constant 1.687 0.068 gender 0.170 0.082 0.104

age -0.030 -0.015 0.770 profession 0.239 0.138 0.007

R2= 0.015, F= 3.088, p= 0.027;

TABLE VI. MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS WITH PRIVACY_CONCERN AS DEPENDENT VARIABLE

b p value constant 1.812 0.033 gender 0.172 0.090 0.073

age -0.030 -0.016 0.747 profession 0.235 0.148 0.004

R2= 0.019, F= 3.606; p= 0.014;

TABLE VII. MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS WITH AUDIENCE_AWARENESS AS DEPENDENT VARIABLE

b p value constant 1.988 0.012 gender 0.169 0.095 0.059

age -0.023 -0.013 0.792 profession 0.204 0.138 0.007

R2=0.017; F= 3.362; p= 0.019; Thus we can conclude that profession, age and gender of

users of social networking sites have significant impact on their attitude, level of concern and awareness.

VI. DISCUSSION The aim of this study was to investigate individual’s

behavior around privacy issues and factors affecting it. For this purpose, a research model was developed with external factors (age, gender and profession) and the factors privacy concern, attitude and audience awareness influencing audience behavior. Also, hypotheses were formulated about the research model to examine differences based on gender, age and profession on individual’s attitude, concern and awareness.

Analysis of the data resulted in some interesting findings: Women are more active on social networking sites; Men share more sensitive personal information like location, phone numbers etc and use poorer privacy settings. However, no significant differences were found between men and women regarding concern level about privacy issues of social networking sites. Both are equally concerned about how SNS use their personal information. It is statistically proven that teenagers whose age is less than 20 spend more time online than others. But, no significant differences were found between teens, young adults and adults with regard to privacy concern on serious issues. But young adults (age 21 to 40) are found more concerned and aware regarding privacy issues than teens and adults. It is also investigated that students spend more time online than professionals or others and also are more aware and concerned about the growing privacy risks.

16 2014 5th International Conference- Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence)

The research model was partly supported; the factors age, gender, profession, (online) privacy attitude and audience awareness affected online user behavior. Furthermore, an indirect effect was found of the external factors profession and gender on audience behavior via (online) privacy attitude and concern. Based on these results, it seems that people should be better informed about privacy risks and how to protect their privacy online.

VII. CONCLUSION AND LIMITATION Social networking sites continue increasing its popularity.

To maintain the success of a social networking site, it is important that it should engage the users and motivate them by providing different services. The aim of this study was to investigate if users are aware of privacy issues, risks and to study the various factors influencing audience usage behavior. For this purpose, a research model was developed which was partly supported and some hypothesis were formulated in order to understand the behavioral aspects of user. Concerning privacy, the results suggest that most of people know the present scenario regarding privacy issues, but they are less concerned while actually implementing it. But also they do mind if somehow their privacy gets disrupted. Furthermore, women and young adults care more about their privacy than men and teenagers. Also, young adults were more concerned about their online privacy than adults. Furthermore, it can be argued that people do not have an accurate risk perception of (online) privacy risks and do not protect their personal information well. Hence safer use of social network sites would thus require a major change in user attitudes and their level of awareness both in words and actions. Therefore, more scientific research and media attention is necessary to warn people and try to change their attitude.

However there are some limitations to this study that should be mentioned. First, the data collection method is concentrated to selective group of individuals, which may limits generalizability of the results to other populations, for example, the very old. Second, because a one-time survey was used, it was not possible to establish causality. Third, this survey was self-report rather than observing and recording the behavior by conducting interviews or demos. While this study provides insight into whether people are aware of their audiences and risks regarding privacy issues, it does not clearly capture information on how they actually behave on the internet.

REFERENCES [1] 2014 Best Social Networking Site reviews and Comparisons at:

http://social-networking-websitesreview.toptenreviews.com/index.html [2] Statistics at: http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts

[3] Gross, Ralph, and Alessandro Acquisti, "Information revelation and privacy in online social networks," in Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, ACM, 2005.

[4] Steinfield, Charles, Nicole B. Ellison, and Cliff Lampe, Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis."Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, vol. 29, pp. 434-445, 2008

[5] Gangadharbatla, Harsha, "Facebook me: Collective selfesteem, need to belong, and internet self-efficacy as predictors of the iGeneration's attitudes toward social networking sites" in Journal of interactive advertising, vol. 8, pp. 5-15, 2008.

[6] Chen, Rui, "Member use of social networking sites—an empirical examination" in Decision Support Systems, vol. 54, pp. 1219-1227, 2013

[7] Qin, Li, Yongbeom Kim, Jeffrey Hsu, and Xin Tan, "The effects of social influence on user acceptance of online social networks" in International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, vol. 27,pp. 885-899, 2011.

[8] Dhami, Anil, et al. "Impact of trust, security and privacy concerns in social networking: An exploratory study to understand the pattern of information revelation in Facebook" in IEEE, 2012.

[9] Veltri, Natasha F. and Wafa Elgarah, "The role of national cultural differences in user adoption of social networking" in Southern Association for Information Systems Conference, Charleston, SC, 2009.

[10] Phippen, Andy, Richard Davey, and Steven Furnell, "Should we do it just because we can? Methodological and ethical implications for information revelation in online social networks" in Methodological Innovations Online vol. 4, pp. 41-55, 2009.

[11] Cheung, Christy MK, Pui-Yee Chiu, and Matthew KO Lee, "Online social networks: Why do students use Facebook?" in Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 27, pp. 1337-1343 2011.

[12] Purcell, Kristen, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr, Social media & mobile internet use among teens and young adults” in Washington, DC: Pew internet & american life project, 2010.

[13] Lin, Kuan-Yu, and Hsi-Peng Lu, "Why people use social networking sites: An empirical study integrating network externalities and motivation theory," in Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 27, pp. 1152-1161, 2011.

[14] Tsoi, Ho Keung, and Li Chen, "From Privacy Concern to Uses of Social Network Sites: A Cultural Comparison via User Survey" in Privacy, security, risk and trust (passat), 2011 ieee third international conference on and 2011 ieee third international conference on social computing (socialcom), pp. 457-464. IEEE, 2011

[15] Quinn, Darren, Liming Chen, and Maurice Mulvenna. "Does Age Make a Difference in the Behaviour of Online Social Network Users?" in International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, IEEE, 2011.

[16] Mohamed, Norshidah, and Ili Hawa Ahmad, "Information privacy concerns, antecedents and privacy measure use in social networking sites: Evidence from Malaysia" in Computers in Human Behavior, 2012.

[17] Correa, Teresa, et al, "Personality and Social Media Use", 2013. [18] Jin, Long, Yang Chen, Tianyi Wang, Pan Hui, and Athanasios V.

Vasilakos, "Understanding user behavior in online social networks: A survey." IEEE Communications Magazine, 2013

[19] Ajzen, Icek. "The theory of planned behavior." Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50.2, pp. 179-211, 1991

[20] Available at: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/whatstat/whatstat.htm.

2014 5th International Conference- Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence) 17