According to an analysis carried out on the usage of Facebook, it has been found out that the more information users reveal about themselves, the more they become protective. Facebook has grown to be the most famous social networking site in past few years. People share almost everything about themselves over there; the birth dates, graduation pictures, family pictures, vacations, wedding pictures and the list continues. The more they share these things the more they get curious as who sees it and who doesn’t.
A recent study on privacy setting of Facebook showed that from 2005 to 2011 Facebook made a lot of changes in its layout, privacy settings and modes of sharing data. For example they introduced the feature of timeline in 2011, in order to encourage users to fill in much more details with dates so that when they look for date in future, they can easily find it. Not only this, Facebook offers a diverse range of application to its users for example users can tag people in a post, a picture or a status to let them inform about the happenings.
But even this wide range of features and applications users becomes less likely to reveal their personal information on Facebook because of the misuse of data. Because of this problem it was found out that there was a decline in users revealing their contact details on Facebook. They feel insecure when they share their phone numbers of addresses and therefore we have seen a large portion on users sharing fake contact details to make themselves secure.
Between 2009 and 2011 there came a change in the privacy policies of Facebook to make the users feel secure. After this change there was a swift in user’s data sharing because now a user was able to control the visibility of every data that is they can change the people who can view their post on every single thing, making it completely customized for everyone.
This can be concluded as due to change in privacy policies by Facebook, the data sharing has increased but again users need more protection. For example the cover picture privacy, currently it’s visible to all weather a friend or not. People need a platform where they can actually control each and everything on their profile. And such a change might increase the user’s interest and data sharing on Facebook.
