Annotated Bibliography

The paper is written by Assistant Professor of the American University in Emirates, by engaging with participants of Middle East, Europeans, Asian and other multi-race individuals. This papers highlights that users have many privacy, security and trust related concerns with use of Facebook, as they are not able to hide personal informational from their friendship networks and information can easily be obtained through group memberships and networks of users. However, many are still using it regardless of these concerns, because they want to connect with friends and families and are virtual addicted. The same has been mentioned in the study of Wang, Xu & Grossklags (2011) stating that commercial uses, virtual addiction and enjoyment are few reasons which compel the individuals to use Facebook, regardless of privacy and security concerns. This study is well aligned with my topic, as it clearly highlighted that people have concerns regarding privacy and security issues of Facebook usage.

The authors in this study have focused on the contextual gaps which cause privacy issues on Facebook, indicating that Facebook has not successfully contextualized the offline friendship phenomenon to online social networking. In this social networking platform, the information of user and also of user’s friend can be shared with any third party, showing that norms of information flow are not being followed effectively by Facebook. The gap in offline and online granularity is said to cause issue of privacy and it is stated that most of privacy issues on Facebook are considered as design issues. Facebook needs to adopt better design to eliminate the tradeoff faced by users in disclosure and control of information, as aligned with the views of Mishra et al. (2012). These results have enabled to understand the causes behind poor privacy and security features of Facebook, showing substantial relevancy with issue of bibliography.

The study has detailed numerous security issues which are challenging privacy and security of the users in cyber space. The issue of privacy and confidentiality theft is based on the third party information sharing notion of Facebook, through which personal and private information of user might be exchanged between applications. Likewise, the identity theft, intellectual property theft (such as, personal video or music), stalking, harassment and defamation are considerable security issues for users. Finally, any transfer of payment and transactions involving third party applications can affect the security of the users. This paper has highlighted that many of real world security issues are all relevant with security issues of Facebook, which according to Zlatolas et al. (2015) is an alarming attribute of virtual networking and users need to be aware of these issues. The insight from this paper has substantially added in detailing the security challenges of Facebook, thus adding positively in understanding of the issue. 

This study has made an effort to explore the privacy and security perceptions of college students, while they were entering into the Social Networking Sites (SNS). Few of the core concerns which have been mentioned by the students were linked with; personal privacy, identity theft, stalking, harassment and future employment. The study has furthered that young students who were newly entering the university, were least bothered to share their information and any resulting misusage of that information. On the other hand, female respondents were more concerned about misuse of their personal information, as compared to their male counterparts. These results suggest that young people need to make aware of the potential privacy and security issues associated with Facebook usage (Yaakop, Anuar & Omar, 2013).  These results are highly aligned with the issue at hand, as it has explored the privacy perceptions of participants while sharing information on social networking sites.