Social Networking Sites

By

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1

Background of the Study1

Privacy1

Privacy Regulations2

Problem Statement2

Aims and Objectives3

Research Questions3

Significance3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW4

Privacy4

EU Directives and Regulations on Data Protection4

Cases Violating the Data Privacy of users on SNS5

Case 15

Case 26

Privacy Regulations6

Privacy regulations in US6

Privacy Regulations in Europe7

Social Networking Sites Privacy7

Online Identify9

Social Networking Sites10

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY12

Research Design12

Secondary Methodology12

Literature Search13

Reliability & Validity of Sources14

Limitation of Research15

Ethical Considerations15

CHAPTER 4: ANTICIPATED RESULTS16

Data Protection Privacy Regulations for Social Networking Sites16

Users Data Protection Regulations and SNS16

SNS and Subscribers Personal Information17

REFERENCES18

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Social networking sites have transformed into a top-notch platform to share the thoughts and connect the people around this world. People are immensely involved in this social platform, and they consider it to be a safe place. It allow individuals to publish details about themselves and connect to other members of the network through friendship links (Engdahl 2007, 220). With an enormous level of engagement, people overshadow the threat that social networking sites do not entirely secure the privacy of users.

Social networking sites like facebook and Myspace, twitter and some others are undoubtedly following the EU directives and regulations of data protection, although, innumerable cases of violating the users' privacy on social networking websites reveal the fact that these sites are not fully implementing the EU directives and regulations of Data privacy.Social networking can allow users to interact relative to location and time. Content sharing on social networking websites has significantly increased over the last few years. Popular services such as Face book, My Space, Fraudster or the Rout allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with a huge list of friends. The increasing availability of extended geo location technologies including cell tower localization on internet services and Assisted Global Positioning System (AGPS) on phone devices has changed the way people interact with each other on the web (Vogel 2010, 66). It has enriched the social networking experience with the additional social dynamics.

Privacy

The term privacy, in the context of online networks, can be expounded as a phenomenon of controlling the person's information that can be revealed in any online medium. Privacy has not been regarded as a significant issue in most of the social networking systems. Alan Westin (Westin 1967) explicates privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others” (Spivet 2012, 170). Privacy concerns have emerged globally as massive user information is collected by social networking sites. With the rise of user generated online content the definition of privacy has become more subjective. Every person might have different privacy requirements on the information content they share depending upon the context. Privacy control mechanisms should be effective enough to capture contextual information about their users and use them in semantically rich privacy constraints. The real life cases of violating the data privacy rules and regulations in the Social networking sites reveals that these sites are not implementing the regulations ...