Perspectives for Sharing Personal Information on Online Social Networks

摘要

The goal of this research was to study how people feel about sharing personal information on social networks. The research was done by interviews; 50 people were interviewed, mostly from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Finland. This paper presents the included 12 questions and discusses the collected answers. It was discovered, e.g., that 38 out of the 50 answerers use social media every day and share versatile personal information on the Internet. Half of the answerers also share information about other people on the Internet. It was also discovered that compared to male answerers, the female answerers were more active in sharing information about other people. There was a significant variety in opinions: what should be the age limit for sharing personal information online, while 22 out of the 50 answerers felt that there is no need for an age limit at all. According to the answers, only a few people use social media for making new friends. Instead, an important reason for using social media is that their existing friends are using. An interesting finding was that the answerers see the Internet as a part of the real world; the privacy that you have on the Internet is the privacy that you have in the real world.