User perspective of privacy and surveillance on social networks

Abstract: Social networks have integrated into people’s daily lives and they became a powerful medium for effective marketing and communication worldwide. Problem raise when governments and special agencies violate users’ information privacy under the pretext of protecting national security or something as, furthermore, when information became the source of income for social networks it became necessary to investigate users concerns about informational privacy on social platforms, if there are. The main purpose of the thesis is to understand what level of privacy awareness users on social networks have and how much relevant knowledge about surveillance on social networks they recognize. Moreover, the thesis aims to present users’ opinion about surveillance on Facebook and if they accept to be surveyed in certain scenarios. As results, the study has identified ambiguity in Facebook terms and data policy, while there has been clarity that Facebook applies massive surveillance in terms of data collection on all users on the network. 71% of the participants had concerns about their privacy on social networks, two-thirds of the participants didn’t read Facebook terms and 76% did believe that social networks sell users information for own benefits. The majority of the interview participants showed lack of knowledge about data collection on social networks, and didn’t know if governments do surveillance on social platforms or not. However, 37% of the survey participants claimed that they have nothing to hide and governments can look into their activities online, and almost similar percentage supported such an action. Further, most of the interview participants protect their informational privacy on social networks by having good privacy settings, controlling who have access to certain posts or managing friends list. However, 1/3 of the participants who had good privacy settings didn’t know all their friends on FB. Through personal observations on data analysis and literature review, I concluded the thesis with some suggestions of possible approaches to enhance information privacy, these recommendations present my own thoughts and weren’t derived in academic way rather personal notes during the thesis study.