Online Privacy Management

Social media have become incredibly popular among youngsters all over the world. Social media platforms have grown continually and have become parts of our daily lives. Each of these social media platforms has their own guidelines, rules, goals and purposes. For this research, the focus will be on the most popular social media platform Facebook. Because of its popularity, it has been studied multiple times. This study will only focus on one group of Facebook-users, namely youngsters, and more specifically, Dutch youngsters. Dutch youngsters are using Facebook, but no study yet has focused on this specific group. The aim of this research is to find out what Dutch youngsters are exposing on their Facebook profile, why they choose to share this information, and why they decide to not share other information. Moreover, this research will gain knowledge on how Dutch youngsters protect themselves from privacy issues, and how they build their own online privacy protection strategies. To gain knowledge about the actual behavior of the Dutch youngsters, 10 in depth interviews were held with boys and girls, between the ages of 13-18, born and raised in the Netherlands. The results derived from the in depth interviews were very interesting. The sample of Dutch youngsters seemed to be quite generous in sharing their personal information online, while doing little to no adjustments to their standard privacy settings on Facebook. However, while the standard settings were left untouched, other privacy protection strategies were actively used. While the participants did not completely understand the meaning and opportunities of the standard Facebook settings, they did not feel that they needed to learn anything new about privacy issues and privacy protection strategies.