Privacy In Social Networking Sites Essay

2.2 Impact of privacy concern in social networking web sites

In the Internet Age, we have witnessed the rapid growth of social network web sites (SNWs) such as Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Orkut, in recent years (Zhou, 2011). Users across the world have signed up for accounts on SNWs in order to discover other people with similar interests or experience, to share personal information with both friends and strangers, or to establish business contacts.

For SNW users, theoretically, there are many privacy issues that deserve serious consideration. First, the information posted in public or semi-public user profiles can lead to such risks as identity theft, sexual exploitation, online stalking, and cyber harassment (Gross and Acquisti, 2005). Second, the posting of personal and private information

Mostly people argue that support for users’ privacy, however, has not been extended equally to all users from around the world. Facebook would be founded in 2004 initially for affiliates of Harvard University, sites like Friendster and MySpace had just begun to receive attention from academia (d. boyd, 2004) and localized social networks covered much of the rest of the world, from Cyworld in South Korea to iWiW in Hungary (N. Messieh,2012). Each social networking site had its own idiosyncrasies, norms, and interface affordances. Many of the past studies of cross-cultural privacy issues have focused narrowly on a handful of phenomena in only one or two different countries, and the paucity of reliable data has been compounded by the preponderance of pilot studies and other small-scale studies in the field (E. Vitkauskait˙e, 2010). Much of the past work in cross-cultural issues in social media (E. Vitkauskait˙e, 2010) has used Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (G. Hofstede, 1980) to frame cultural differences. Hofstede investigated cultural differences in the corporate domain, distributing over 100,000 questionnaires