The Influence of Privacy Settings, Privacy Awareness, and Privacy Seeking Behavior towards Information Disclosure on Facebook

Abstract:

Facebook is the social networking sites (SNS) that allows everyone to communicate and share information with their family and friends over the internet. Information disclosure give a negative impact to users, for example, there has been a theft of personal information such as a picture of a Facebook user has been stolen by someone else and used his picture as a profile picture in another social media. The study aim to identify privacy settings commonly used by Facebook users, the difference in the level of information disclosure among different demographic and the effect of privacy settings, privacy awareness and privacy seeking behaviours towards information disclosure. Independent variables (IV) developed include privacy settings, privacy awareness and privacy seeking behaviours. Thus, this research has three hypotheses in examining whether these three factors have a relationship with the information disclosure of Facebook users. Respondents for this research is 216 among high education students in Malaysia. From the result, it can be shown that all the hypothesis has a significant relationship towards information disclosure which is three of them is accepted and the strongest relationship is between privacy seeking behaviours towards information disclosure. Besides, this research is very important for students and other people, to give them awareness about the important of privacy towards information disclosure. This research also will benefits users to remain alert with their privacy and vigilance before sharing their personal information in social media.