Impact of privacy attitude, concern and awareness on use of online social networking

Online social networking has extended the boundaries of social communication. Now everybody can share their personal stuffs, feelings and relations even on internet too. Although it provides an ease of communication but on the other side this online interaction has created a pool of wide information which can be easily achieved and can be misused. These Online Social Networks offer security, and privacy mechanisms to protect users' sensitive information from undesired accesses but still these rules are violated as users are not fully aware about the risks and their preventions. The main purpose of this analysis is to examine the affect of privacy issues on usage trends of social networking sites. This paper explains the impact of gender, age and profession of user on attitude and awareness and in turn behavior of social network users. A research model is developed which is based on proposed hypothesis. This research model has been confirmed through data collected from 400 social networking site users through online survey based on questionnaire, and the analysis results provide support to the model.