Internet social network communities: Risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns

Fogel, Joshua, and Elham Nehmad. "Internet social network communities: Risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns." Computers in Human Behavior (Elsevier) 25, no. 1 (January 2009): 153-160

This article examines risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns among college students relative to social networking websites, mainly Facebook and MySpace. The authors pull research data from many other studies to weave into their conclusions.

The authors first examine usage statistics and behavior for a few networking websites, providing data for issues such as privacy concerns on Facebook – for example, students’ attitudes towards a stranger knowing where they live and being able to view their class schedule.

A literature review was performed, gathering statistics from various studies on a number of different relevant issues to the study, the first one being “risk taking” behavior among college students. Some of the risk taking behaviors reviewed were: risky sex while in high school; substance abuse while in high school. The results revealed that there are distinct gender differences towards risk taking behavior, with women being inclined to participate in less risk taking behaviors than men. Other studies reviewed included trust among college students and privacy among college students. The authors used social contract theory as a framework for their own research. “This theory posits that consumers assume an implied social contract when exchanging information in a transaction (Pan & Zinkhan, 2006) (Fogel and Nehmad 2009)”.

The authors’ premise is that young people trying things for the first time are more likely to be involved with risk taking behavior, so the study seeks to correlate college students’ risk taking behavior to their use of social networking websites. They also did a number of trust and privacy measurements related to the students’ usage of the social networking websites in addition to measuring gender differences in the data.

Their own study consisted of 205 participants from a four year undergraduate commuting inner city college taken via a convenience sample of students approached in various public areas of the school, including the cafeteria and the library. They had a 96.2% response rate to their survey. They measured attitudes on Likert scales, including: risk averseness scale, consumer trust scale, privacy behavior scale, time pressure scale, privacy concern scale, and similar scales. Using various statistical analyses methods, they tabulated the results concluding that students who had profiles on social networking websites also participated in more risk taking behaviors. In relation to gender, men participate in more risky behavior than women, therefore they are more likely to reveal more personal information on line. The authors recommend that there be some sort of filtering system so that individuals creating an online profile are made aware of the privacy issues before being allowed to sign up.

The methodology and data analysis seemed very exacting and relevant to the study, and the literature review was very comprehensive. The demographics represented a good proportion of gender, race, and immigrant status. The authors used ANOVA to compare individuals using social networking profiles to those who do not, in addition to a number of other tests to compare and contrast the data.

On first glance, the conclusion and recommendations of the study appear to be somewhat week – the authors recommend that certain information be disclosed by social networking websites before individuals are allowed to create a profile, one must consider the year when this study was done, 2008. Privacy attitudes and adoption of social networking websites have radically changed since then, with social networking websites such as Facebook increasing their membership levels by huge percentages. This alone is an indicator that privacy attitudes are quickly changing and becoming more relaxed as time goes on.

This study is relevant to my research because it looks at another aspect of how people's desire to enjoy and utilize the benefits of the World Wide Web superseded the relative importance to them of on-line privacy. This provides some evidence that, at least initially, the risk takers forged our culture’s adoption and acceptance into social networking (one example of online usage related to privacy), relaxing our privacy standards as a result.