Social Media Privacy Case Study

1121 Words3 Pages

Ever since the founding of the internet, privacy has been a growing concern. The internet has been a place where information about anything and everything is readily accessible at the touch of our fingertips, and just as easily personal information about people can be found. With the amount of social media and how it interacts with people 's lives, it can be said that privacy is a depleting resource. Privacy is a "fixture in public discourse", with the most enduring issues in this sphere being related to informational technologies such as the world wide web. (Nissenbaum 2004, p. 119) This essay will disagree with Mark Zuckerberg 's statement, claiming that privacy is still a social norm, and disagree with the the notion that attitudes to …show more content…

The case study refers to the implementation of the news feed function that was introduced to Facebook on September 2006, whereby users could obtain information about their friends and their activities via a headline news format. (Xu et. al, 2010, p. 2) The news feed also allowed for real time updates of profile picture changes as well as conversations between friends and family. The newsfeed feature was promoted as a tool of convenience (Xu et. al, 2010, p. 2) but users protested, claiming that their information was exposed and invaded. (Boyd 2008, cited in Xu et. al, 2010, p. 2) This case study is supported by that of Hoadley et. al (2009), where concerns of privacy are mirrored due to an "illusory loss of control" and increased information access. Furthermore, out of the 172 respondents, 68% showed a certain degree of negativity towards the perceived loss of privacy. (Hoadley et. al 2009, p. 54) The respondents were also asked in regards to their agreement of the statement "I protested to this (newsfeed)change because others did." whereby 80% of the respondents disagreed. (Hoadley et. al 2009, p. 55) These case studies show the importance of privacy in regard to social media sites, and the growing concerns from users that their personal information such as age and location are no longer as private as before. This shows that if this case study can be any indication of current media users attitudes to privacy, it presents a …show more content…

al 2013, p. 1) with 40% of teen media users stating that they are somewhat concerned about third party accessibility to their personal information, (Madden et. al 2013, p. 10) with only 9% reporting that they are very concerned. (Madden et. al 2013, p. 10) These statistics significantly differ from the attitudes of parents, with 81% of parents reporting that they are somewhat concerned and 46% reporting that they are very concerned. (Madden et. al 2013, p. 10) These attitudes towards privacy can be seen as a combination of ignorance and arrogance on the side of teens, where these social media platform users hold a perceived notion that the information they provide will not be misused or given out freely to interested parties although it might not be the case. (Trepte, Reinecke & Walter 2011, p. 3) Furthermore, the difference in these statistics show the differing levels of privacy concerns between parents and teens, making it difficult to pin point whether attitudes to privacy are a social norm as it depends on which point of view it is being assessed

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