An empirical study of user's attitudes and behavior of privacy concerns

As the Internet grows in importance, concerns about online privacy have arisen. College students routinely provide personal information on profiles that can be viewed by huge numbers of unknown people and potentially used in harmful ways. SNS like Renren allow users to control the privacy level of their profile, thus limiting access to this information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current situations of online privacy among college students. In this article, we take the preference for privacy itself as our unit of analysis, and analyze the factors that are predictive of a student having a private versus public profile and the protection for it. Finally, we argue that privacy behavior is an upshot of both social influences and personal incentives. Through an in-depth interview, the author also find the perceived benefits from Renren outweigh the potential risks of privacy.