Self-disclosure and Social network sites users' awareness

摘要

Since the rise of the Social network sites (SNSs), the people's private personal details have hugely and publicly disclosed. People are sharing, chatting, commenting, tagging and self-disclosing large amount of private information. There are many SNSs and among the popular ones are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Cyworld, Bebo and Youtube. This paper intends to understand what kind of information users disclose and share with other Facebook users. It also tries to understand the users' awareness about privacy threats and data violations. Findings from this study indicates that majority of the respondents disclose information including personal and private information, although they aware of Facebook default setting and privacy setting changes that the system provides.