Media Competence regarding Facebook Privacy Settings

Are users just too incompetent to protect their private data?

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,0, University of Copenhagen (Deptartment of Media, Cognition and Communication), course: Audience and User Studies, language: English, abstract: In September 2012 Facebook welcomed the one billionth user and can therefore be entitled as the current biggest social interaction platform worldwide. With growing success since its launch in February 2004 questions about privacy security for user data became a growing issue as well. With expanding user numbers these questions seem to become louder than ever. During the years the Facebook has been on international focus for several privacy flaws for instance in 2005 for not encrypting users' passwords, in 2006 for publishing every single friend activity without any restriction possibilities in a news feed on the personal start page or in 2007 the implementation of a platform for applications by third-party suppliers. In academic treatments about privacy made so far mainly Facebook itself was putted on the spot and accused of violating their user's privacy. The social network giant was blamed to treat their user's privacy too carelessly and to make the matter worse Facebook became more and more commercial - with personal data as currency. The start of showing presence at the stock market in 2011 was just the logical consequence of this new company policy. The two latest critic points Facebook needed to defend for were the standard settings for the privacy interface within the context of the new timeline optic and the latest change in Facebook privacy terms. Both changes happened in 2012. After doing some first superficial research it seemed like there is no academic study so far that does not focus on Facebook as a company in charge regarding this matter. But one could wonder if the users themselves are in charge as well. Are we exhausting our options to protect our private data on Facebook? While Facebook's privacy flaws are well examined, relatively little literature is available on how much users know and care about these issues. My assumption is that most of the users aren't doing much about the assumed lack of privacy beyond venting about it.