The Role Of Privacy In Social Media

Privacy in new media is a common topic today’s information-saturated society. The outburst in social networking sites is an exciting opportunity to connect and network. But at the same time privacy is under threat. Users are sharing large no of data on social medias/ Internet. Privacy is the individual or group information and their ability to keep them or reveal partially. Privacy is also about the right to know who collects this information, why the information is being collected, and how it will be used. (Soffer and Cohen, 2015) Privacy is subjective to an individual or group; sometime it is about being anonymous in the public. Since social media have become an integral part of human life and their use has been increased significantly over

He believes that “privacy is something fairly new and wasn’t even guaranteed decades ago”. He continue saying that “Our social behavior is quite damaging to privacy. Technology has outraced our social intellect”. (www.tech.firstpost.com)

Hichang Cho, Milagros Rivera- Sanchez and Sun Sun Lim, 2009 from National University of Singapore had done a study on online privacy and global concern. They surveyed 1261 Internet users from five cities (Bangalore, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and New York) to study multinational and multicultural user’s views and social responses concerning online privacy. The results were surprising, the response from users showed the individual differences. Age, gender, Internet experience, race and national culture significantly influenced the privacy concerns of each user. It showed the extend Internet users from a personal culture were more concerned about online privacy than their counterparts. One of the prediction they made was “There will be a negative relationship between internet-related experiences and online privacy concern”. Although this study was limited with figures collected online, it give some insight to the topic (Cho, Sanchez and Lim,

The significant differences in privacy fears often found between young and old generation are unconventional as the result of the differences found in their privacy concepts. The difference in concepts can be linked back to their developmental life stages. In my opinion we can relate this to internet-related experiences as mentioned by Cho, Sanchez and Lim, 2009. One more interesting thing about this study is that this is one of the first to include adolescents when exploring the privacy concerns amongst young and old. Young people are assumed to be less concerned with their privacy and to value their privacy less compared to older people (Nussbaum 2007; Palfrey and Gasser 2008). Steijn and Vedder bring two contradicting facts 1. Significant number of studies has reported that younger people are indeed less concerned with privacy than older individuals (Fox et al. 2000; Marketing-Charts 2009; Paine et al. 2007; Zukowski and Brown 2007). 2. Young people are in fact concerned with privacy and do not differ from older people in terms of privacy concerns (e.g., Hoofnagleet al. 2010; Madden and Smith 2010; Tufekci 2012). Same time they recognize that all of these studies have only included respondents eighteen years old and older, and adolescents are