Case statement: This project focuses on how easy it is to access other's personal information through social networking sites, and also how readily people give their information out to others, in order to better conceptualize true online privacy.
We created six separate fake Facebook profiles: three girl profiles and three boy profiles (a 16 year old, 21 year old, and 35 year old in each gender category). We contrsructed each profile with pictures of random people, and very general "likes" according to gender and age. We added 100 random friends on each profile (so, 600 people in total), and over the course of a month watch to see who accepts or who rejects, messages us, or leaves us with no response. We also want to see if people will interact with these profiles. Like, will people message the profile if they feel like they don't know who it is? Will they like the pictures on the page, or comment on the wall (However, we will not interact with anybody)?
Our goal is to see how easily people are willing to give out their information to somebody they don't know, and look at how age and gender affects that.
Of those that accepted us, we looked to see what kind of information they put on their profile. We looked to see if they put out their phone numbers, addresses, email, birthday, hometown, or job/school.
Results:
Our results were as predicted. The younger the age, the more willing the people were in accepting our friend requests.
Age 16:
Total people who accepted: 122/200
Rejected: 20/200
Messaged: 4/200
No response: 54/200
Age 21:
Accepted: 59/200
Rejected: 42/200
Messaged: 23/200
No response: 76/200
Age 35:
Accepted: 24/200
Rejected: 68/200
Messaged: 4/200
No respose: 104/200
There were a total of 205 people that accepted our request. Of those, here is the data of the kind of information they put on their profiles:
Phone number: 94/205
Email: 183/205
Address: 4/205
Hometown: 164/205
Job/school: 152/205
Birthday: 197/205
** Please refer to the PDF file for all of the separate data charts **
This project focuses on how easy it is to access other's personal information on social networking sites like Facebook, and also how readily people give their information to others.