TAMPA – It all starts with the lure of the Facebook newsfeed. Status updates, spring break photo albums and the ever-changing relationship statuses of your “friends” are just begging to distract you from your paper that is due tomorrow.
Before you can stop yourself, it’s 3:16 a.m., you just friend requested your middle school science teacher, and can identify complete strangers from your suite mate’s trip to Cancun.
Thanks to the phenomenon of social media websites, this wealth of personal data is readily available and is blurring the lines of what constitutes public and private information.
Dr. Natasha Veltri, professor of information and technology management, conducted a study on Facebook privacy and presented its findings to a crowd of 45 students at a University of Tampa Honors Symposium.
“Sharing information is the key to Facebook,” Veltri explains. “How much users share and disclose…they have to account for the risks. A lack of privacy is one of those costs.”
Veltri surveyed 254 active Facebook users.
Sixty six percent of the participants limit their profile to only be viewed by friends, yet 65 percent indicated that they have 200 or more friends.
“It reminds me of the quote, ‘Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.’ Do all these friends define who you are? Do you really want to be connected to all these people?” Veltri asked.
Veltri showcased this point to the students at the presentation.
Eighty percent of the surveyed participants said they are concerned that their information can be used by other parties.
Veltri said that many people do not realize that what you post on Facebook actually belongs to Facebook.
Ever pay attention to the advertisements on the side of the Facebook page? If so, you may notice that they are tailored slightly to target your personality. Facebook plainly states that some of your information is available to their advertisers in the privacy agreement:
“We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are.”
“Through Facebook, your social behavior is a way to target ads. The ads on the side of my Facebook page will be different than yours. It’s a very new way for advertisers to target a specific segment,” Veltri said.
Just how much of your information can be tracked for advertisers through Facebook?
In a recent New York Times article, MIT took 40,000 networks on Facebook and tried to determine those which belonged to gay men based on a profile’s interests and links. The researchers speculation was actually able to determine which profiles belong to gay men 70 percent of the time.
Not only can your friends and advertisers access information, 70-80 percent of human resources departments in companies look online also.
Veltri hopes to caution more students on guarding their Facebook privacy now, before they begin looking for a career.
“Whatever you do put up is out there. I hear from a lot of students ‘I don’t care,’ but as you go into your careers you have to define your name. If you’re going to run a bar, then it probably doesn’t matter,” joked Veltri. “ But it is all a lot more public than students think.”