engleski

Social Media Networking Literacy and Privacy on Facebook: Comparison of Pupils and Students Regarding the Public Availability of Their Personal Information

Globally, social networks have become digital meeting places of a large number of people. One of the most popular social networks is Facebook. Its users publish personal information on a daily basis. Many of them do not take the effort to limit the level of availability of personal information (Park, 2013). Excessive and unwanted availability of personal information could pose a risk, especially for young users (Trottier & Lyon, 2012). Personal information privacy is an essential aspect of social media networking literacy which J. N. Gathegi defines as the ability to appreciate the risks posed by social media and to make calculated decisions when dealing with such social media, in order to make a careful balance between the needs for sharing, privacy and legal compliance (2014). In this paper we will describe our research, to explore and compare the personal information privacy behaviour of pupils and students who are members of Facebook, by determining the extent to which their personal information is publicly available on Facebook. Gross and Acquisti (2005) conducted a similar study. In the first phase of our study, the content analysis method will be used to quantitatively determine the extent to which the following types of personal information about pupils and students are publicly available on their Facebook profiles: posts, photos, friends, user self-description (birthday, political preference...), membership in Facebook groups, user likes (movies, books...), check-ins, events. In the second phase of study, the method of comparative analysis will be used to compare the extent to which various types of personal information about pupils and students are publicly available on their Facebook profiles. The study sample for these two research phases will consist of 400 Facebook profiles of students and pupils: a) 200 profiles will be chosen from among students’ Facebook community “Sveučilište u Zadru” (Zadar University ; Croatia) ; b) 200 profiles will be chosen from among the pupils’ Facebook community “OK je OK!” and from among the male Facebook friends of the members of this community. In the third phase of our study, qualitative content analysis will be used to determine examples of publicly available personal information that could be misused. The study sample for this phase will consist of 20 Facebook profiles chosen from the first sample. Through this research, we will gain insights about the extent to which personal information about pupils and students is publicly available on their Facebook profiles, and insights about the similarities and differences in personal information privacy behaviour of these two groups. The research results could help advance understanding of the privacy protection behaviour of young Facebook users and create better educational programs for the improvement of privacy protection behaviour and social media networking literacy. By gaining precise insights about the amount of various types of personal information available on Facebook, more focused educational programs could be developed to alleviate the most widespread, risky information disclosure behaviour. References - Gathegi, J. N. (2014). Social media networking literacy: Rebalancing sharing, privacy, and legal observance. In. S. Kurbanoğlu et al. (Eds.), Information Literacy, Lifelong Learning and Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century, Second European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2014, Dubrovnik, Croatia, October 20–23, 2014: Proceedings. CCIS, vol. 492 (pp. 101–108). Cham: Springer International Publishing.. - Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society (pp. 71–80). Association for Computing Machinery. - Park, Y. J. (2013). Digital literacy and privacy behavior online. Communication Research, 40(2), 215–236. - Trottier, D., & Lyon, D. (2012). Key features of social media surveillance. In C. Fuchs et al. (Eds.), Internet and Surveillance: The challenges of Web 2.0 and social media, 16, 89–105.

social media networking literacy; privacy; Facebook; pupils; students

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