We felt it best to display our findings and data through a blog that we continuously updated throughout the term. As such, we will present all our project, once completed, through the blog, which can be found here: http://privacyproject.wordpress.com/
Below is our initial statement of intent and project outline:
Case Statement: This project focuses on privacy policies in social media in order to better conceptualize the perspective of privacy in virtual interactions.
Problem Statement: Social media presents a façade of privacy. Do the privacy policies of social media meet the privacy expectations of the users?
Boundary Statement: We will narrow our research focus to include privacy policies of major social media empires – Google+, Facebook, and MySpace – but to specifically exclude the outlook on publicness within the realm of privacy.
Research Hypothesis: This team believes that people, especially our peers, have higher expectations of what is and what should be private within social media. However, by the end of this term, we will use the tactics listed below to test this perception of social media’s privacy policies vs. the public’s expectations.
Tactics:
• Share our own experiences with and expectations of privacy within virtual realms.
• Create a poll/questionnaire that will determine our peers’ knowledge of privacy policies within the social media listed above.
• Create a poll/questionnaire that will determine our peers’ expectations of the social media privacy policies as well as privacy within the internet itself.
• Create a poll/questionnaire that will determine our peers’ opinions regarding who or what deserves privacy online. Through these polls we will explore the perceptions of privacy vs. actuality of privacy.
• Debunk the different privacy policies of Google+, Facebook, and MySpace by exploring and explaining the details within the policies.
• Take note of how ambiguous these privacy policies are and where they may confuse or mislead.
• Share links to articles, essays, and other published works that relate to privacy in the virtual realm.
• Collate our findings throughout this process and summarize the outcomes.
The goal of this group project was to discover what privacy really meant through the some of the most established social media sites. We analyzed the privacy policies of Facebook (as well as their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, as we felt it pertinent to include), Google+ and Myspace. Taking vital data from those policies, we created two surveys that would compare users' expectations to the realities of the policies.