A Study on Extent of Awareness Among College Students in Security and Privacy Issues in Social Media

Abstract

Today Social Media is an integral part of many people’s lives. Most of us are users of one or many of these such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Social media networks are the most common platform to communicate with our friends, family and share thoughts, photos, videos and lots of other information in the common area of interest. Privacy has become an important concern in social networking sites. Users are not aware of the privacy risks involved on social media sites and they share their sensitive information on social network sites. While these platforms are free and offer unrestricted access to their services, they puzzle the users with many issues such as privacy, security, data harvesting, content censorship, leaking personal information etc. This paper aims at analyzing, the major users of social media networks, namely, the college students. It was intended to assess the extent the consumers’ are aware of the risks of free usage and how to mitigate against these privacy issues.