3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing - artichoke web design

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3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing The privacy issue on social network sites: Facebook By Yuan Yuan Guo UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Abstract Social network service is one of the most important technologies in Web 2.0, and has appealed hundreds of millions users. It not only provides a platform for users to express themselves, but help them socialize and build up communities online. Social network site (SNS) usually requires users to offer personal information to join in. So, users may public their personal information such as name, age, occupation, and interests on SNS. The information like this may result in privacy issues, which will bring many inconveniences to users not only in the cyberspace but also in the real world. In this paper, I will give an introduction of SNS and Facebook first. Then the concepts of privacy will be discussed. The main part will be focused on the description of current privacy issues on Facebook, and followed by the analysis of reasons and related theories. Simple management measures will be put forward in the final part. keywords social netWorKing sites facebooK priVacy Introduction of SNS and Facebook The social networking service we will study in this paper is the web-based social networks, namely social network sites (SNS), which have developed rapidly in the last several years. There is no explicit definition for SNS because of its various characteristics. According to Acquisti and Gross (2006), SNS is “Internet-communities where individuals interact with others through profiles that represent their selves”. The history of SNS can be traced back to 1978 when Turoff and Hiltz set up the Electronic Information Exchange System, which provided users a platform to email each other, see the bulletin board and access the list servers (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). The website sixdegrees. com found in 1997 was the first widely known website which enables individuals to establish a SNS (Freierman, 1998). After this was the business network of Ryze.com in 2001 and then Friendster.com in 2002, then SNS enjoyed worldwide popularity (boyd, 2004). By 2004, two of the most popular SNSs MySpace and Facebook have been launched, which lead SNS to a new era (Jones and Soltren, 2005). Facebook was created in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard 83
3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing University. His prime intention was to build the Harvard community with students’ directory and ID pictures. Two-thirds students in Harvard posted their pictures and information on the site only in two weeks (Fortune, 2005). By the end of 2004, Facebook owned over 1 million members. In September 2005, Facebook opened its door to high school, and it started to accpet users with workplace e-mail addresses in May 2006. In September, it opened to every one of ages 13 and above with an e-mail addresses (Coughlin, 2006). In October, it attracted nearly 10 million users and rated as the seventh most popular website on the World Wide Web in U.S. (Cassidy, 2006). In April 2008, Facebook caught up with MySpace, and finally became the world’s largest SNS (Arrington, 2008). It developed at a staggering pace, doubling in size since 2009. In July 2010, its users were up to 500 million (The New York Times, 2010). Facebook becomes overwhelming because of its unique features. The most attractive feature is “the site’s authenticated network structure”: most users of each group initially knew others in reality like school or workplace (Kirkpatrick, 2006). Moreover, Facebook’s photo albums appealed a large number of users. It allows members to post unlimited photos, and they can “tag” a friend in the posted photos which will also show up in other friend’s site. However, Facebook has its own flaws. Privacy issue is one of the most disturbing issues, which sparked severe debate recently. The privacy revelation may bring tons of inconveniences to users, sometimes even lead to detrimental results. Concepts of privacy Before referring to the privacy issue, the privacy concept should be reviewed first. According to Brandeis and Warren (1890), privacy is as the “right to be let alone”. According to U.S. Supreme Court, privacy refers to people’s right to seal their private affairs, and protect them from surveillance and intrusion of government (Whalen v. Roe, 1977). Lessing (1998) defined privacy as “what’s left after one subtracts the monitored and the searchable from the balance of social life”. Privacy is a complicated concept which involves “freedom of thought, control over one’s body, solitude in one’s home, freedom from surveillance, protection of one’s reputation, protection from searches and interrogation and control over information about oneself”(Solove, 2002). There is no consensus definition on privacy. A more functional concept for this paper is that privacy refers to one’s control over their personal information (Westin, 1967). Users of SNS have right to protect their personal 84
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3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing - artichoke web design

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