Do we know what we think we know? An exploration of online social network users' privacy literacy

Abstract

Online social networks have increased in popularity and users continue to share abundant information in these sites, despite reported privacy concerns. Although knowledge is recognized as impactful in consumer decision making, privacy knowledge has essentially been ignored in investigations of information disclosure on OSNs. As such, the purpose of this paper was to explore the privacy literacy of Canadian OSN users in terms of subjective and objective privacy knowledge. Exploratory results suggest some privacy literacy differences based upon age and gender and areas where privacy knowledge could be improved.