Private Information Revealed By Romanian Facebook Users - An Exploratory Assessment

The use of online social networks has become part of our lives. More and more people join networks, create their online profile, add pictures with themselves, add personal information about them, find people they know and connect with them, share and like posts, comments, pictures or movies and many more. The social networks allow more and more features and people are open and willing to try them. In this context, it is important for those who own such a profile to be aware of how their personal information is handled, who can view the data they publish in the social network and how they can protect the information they post, by granting access to it only to those persons they want to. The objective of this research was to study what type of information Romanian Facebook users are revealing on their profiles. We have conducted an empirical research, based on an online questionnaire which was available to be accessed in March 2013. 42,5% of the respondents, aged between 21 and 40, formed mostly my employees, managers and students, have not shared on their profiles neither their phone number, their home address, nor their messenger ID. Even though we have considered that the email address was also considered personal and very private information, our assumption did not confirmed, about 30% of the respondents have their email address shown on their profile. At the opposite side, it was confirmed that the gender, real name, personal pictures, birthday and current town are information published by more than 80% the respondents. The respondents do know and do make a difference between having their profile shown when searched on Facebook and allowing their profile to be visualised by whomever they want. Even though most of the respondents have their profile public when searched for it, the great majority have set that only their friends to be able to see the information they post online. Only about 10% of the respondents have added or have accepted friendship requests from people they did not know before and about 30% have never accepted such requests. Overall, we may say that our respondents are careful about what their share on Facebook.