PRIVACY CONCERNS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES IN THE AGE OF MOBILE MARKETING: A STUDY OF USERS' PERCEPTIONS AND THEIR SEGMENTATION

摘要

Social media in general and social networking websites in special have become ubiquitous for modern Internet. With over 2.5 billion active users, they are only surpassed by search engines for users' presence but, unlike search engines, they are capable of gathering much more detailed data about their visitors. Furthermore, they have been heavily coupled with mobile applications in recent years, as more than 1.5 billion of their users access their accounts through their mobile phone, thus offering not only virtual permanent access, but also the possibility to link the user profile data to mobile phone records. As a result, the consumer private space in the online social networking mobile Internet is at an historical low and many users try to find novel avenues to protect their personal information. Our papers gathers data from an extensive online and offline survey in order to try to fathom these privacy concerns and proposes a new segmentation model for online social networking website users based on the discriminant analysis method.