Posterous: Research on social networks and privacy

Internet users flock to social networks to stay connected with friends and family, sharing messages, photos and more. But when it comes to private information, users want to be able to share with their friends and specific circles.

Research from Posterous conducted by Harris Interactive found that most US social network users believe that family and personal photos are suitable for private sharing, while status updates and photos of friends do not need to be so private.

Users of different social networking sites have slightly different concerns about privacy. Facebook users are less concerned about privacy issues, while Google+ users are more concerned about this aspect. This may be related to the fact that Google+ is newly launched and users are still exploring how to use it, and Google+ claims to be able to solve the problem of public and private information sharing.

Research from the USA Today and Gallup Poll in October 2011 also supports this conclusion, showing that familiarity with and degree of use of a website affects users’ perception of privacy. For example, 39% of American Facebook users who use the social network less than once a week are very concerned about privacy issues, while only 26% of those who log in every day are very concerned about privacy issues.

One possibility is that greater concerns about privacy trigger lower use of the site, or that higher use of the site leads to greater familiarity and habituation.

But we shouldn’t mistake a lukewarm understanding of privacy issues for understanding privacy controls. Posterous found that 32% of Facebook users believe they fully understand these privacy controls.

Clearly, there's still a lot of room for improvement here, as a new study from the National Security Cyber ​​Alliance (NSCA) and McAfee found that 21% of U.S. internet users said they were unsure when they last changed their social network privacy settings or admitted to never setting any privacy options; by contrast, 44% said they updated their privacy settings in the last month or last week.

NCSA and McAfee also found that 46% of users said they had changed their social networking usage due to security concerns, while 50% had never done so.