Comparative study on user's perception of privacy issues on Facebook : Young adults vs. adults in Sweden

Abstract: Facebook is a social network that has more than 1.5 billion active members. With the term ‘active’ we mean users who sign in at least once every day on Facebook. Sharing personal information has become a popular activity within the development of all the social networks. Facebook, for instance, contains settings for privacy that allow the user to adjust how "far" the user wants to share his/her own personal information. The problem comes when this can lead to private issues and concerns. The aim of this research was to study the privacy issues perceptions of people within two different ranges of ages, under and over 35 years old. Firstly, we analysed how much people know about privacy on Facebook, and then we tried to understand if there are similarities or differences between those two groups. We thought it would be interesting to know the current state of this phenomena and there was no much research done in Sweden about it. The research was conducted using the mixed method because we wanted to get more global responses from a larger number of respondents in a survey and we wanted to get more detailed answers from an open questionnaire through interviews. We intended to know how is the general knowledge about privacy on Facebook among Swedes. The results showed that people who belonged to the adults group took slightly more care on their privacy than the young-adults group. Also, we discovered that, in general, people are more informed about the risks coming from privacy leaks than a few years ago.