Given the high penetration rate of Facebook and more than 10 million daily active users in Taiwan, the subject of Facebook became an important focus of study. This thesis attempted to examine how factors such as gender and gender, time spent on Facebook, personal privacy orientation, knowledge, negative experiences and privacy concerns would predict users’ profile privacy settings and their use of privacy protection strategies. By utilizing the Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM), individuals and collectives would develop the rules, known as boundary. In the process of managing one’s privacy, they would coordinate the boundary and also mitigate the disruption to the rules established, known as boundary turbulence.
A survey of 1,102 Facebook users in Taiwan through an online questionnaire was conducted over a two-week period from April 29 – May12, 2014, and yielded a confidence level of 95% and a 3% confidence interval. Results showed that 48.6% of respondents were males, while 51.4% were females. Respondents that fell between the age group 25-34 also made up the biggest group among users. Respondents had spent an average of 4.71 years on Facebook at the time of the study, and reported that they spent an average of 3.06 hours on Facebook per day. Facebook users in Taiwan were privacy-oriented, had partial knowledge to Facebook’s privacy policy, and were concerned about their privacy on Facebook, particularly how Facebook utilized their personal user information. As for negative experiences users had on Facebook, over three quarters of them reported the negative experience of being invited into the spammed shopping groups. Respondents also utilized different privacy settings based on the nature of the information on their profiles.
Through performing linear hierarchical regression analyses, results showed that gender, time spent on Facebook, users’ personal privacy orientation, knowledge toward Facebook’s privacy policy and negative experiences served as predictors to the strictness of users’ profile privacy settings. On the other hand, gender, age, knowledge toward Facebook’s privacy policy, negative experiences and privacy concerns served as predictors for users’ privacy protection strategies. This thesis contributed to the current research pool in the following ways. First of all, the sample in this thesis was representative of the population of daily active users in Taiwan. Secondly, while numerous previous studies have focused on predicting users' privacy management via privacy settings or the frequency of updating their privacy settings as dependent variables, this thesis also considered privacy protection strategies, such as deleting Facebook friends, un-tagging photos, and turning off cookies on computers. Thirdly, this thesis also considered users' negative experience on Facebook, and confirmed that it was a significant predictor to both users’ privacy settings on profiles, and privacy protection strategies.
Keywords: Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM), Facebook, privacy, boundary management, Taiwan
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CHENGCHI/G0101461001 |
| Creators | 林宜萱, Lin, Yi Hsuan |
| Publisher | 國立政治大學 |
| Source Sets | National Chengchi University Libraries |
| Language | 英文 |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Rights | Copyright © nccu library on behalf of the copyright holders |
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