Facebook Related Privacy Issues; Perception and Awareness among Albanian Users

Abstract

Social media has become a must for everyone to stay in touch with the rest of the world. Immense information and data are
exchanged through social media every instant. With more than 800 million active users1 Facebook has turned to be both a basic tool for
and a mirror of social interaction, personal identity, and network building among users. However with the increase in usage of Facebook
there are certain privacy issues and perceived risks associated with its usage. In this paper is investigated upon the privacy awareness
of Albanian users on Facebook by analyzing the perception and behaviors of university students. The author tries to find out the extent
Albanian users are concerned about how their identity information may be misused in different ways by third parties and how they
understand the potential threats to their privacy. One more thing that was of much interest is whether Albanian users did allow
Facebook to share their information with third parties or not. It is intended to figure out the behavior patterns of users affected by their
awareness level. For this purpose a survey was conducted to 100 respondents. It is decided to focus more on university students as
recent researches reveal that they are the most frequent Facebook users. Several papers and articles related to the topic were analyzed
prior to start conducting the data analysis in order to get a clearer idea of the subject matter. The author came through interesting
conclusions which are explained more in details in the Findings section.