Individuals voluntarily provide a vast amount of personal information to Facebook and other social networking sites. The privacy concerns of users is an interesting area of research to study. Earlier research suggests that there is often little correlation between an individual’s online privacy concerns and his or her disclosure of personal information.

This study reports on the relationship between an individual’s privacy concerns and his or her knowledge and use of third-party apps on Facebook. In 2010, the authors conducted a 60-question survey that was delivered as a Facebook app. In addition, they collected data from each respondent’s profile in order to measure how much personal information people are willing to share. The survey was viewed 816 times; 516 usable responses were collected. Not all of the responses came from app users. About half of the respondents did not understand that an app has access not only to the user’s profile information, but also to the user’s Facebook friends’ profile information.

The study explores the respondents’ attitudes toward privacy-risky practices by third-party apps, interpersonal privacy risks on Facebook, and institutional privacy risks. Bivariate analysis and regression analysis were used to analyze the survey data. The authors found that some respondents trust their friends and Facebook with their personal information, although “adverse privacy events have a significant influence on application disclosure attitudes.” Furthermore, the respondents reacted negatively to those app developers who distribute users’ personal information to others.

No “predictors associated with third-party app privacy attitudes” were discovered. It appears as though there is “too little awareness ... of what apps are, how they work, and the kinds of threats they pose to privacy.” In summary, the authors found that there is a lack of correlation between privacy concerns and behavior.

The authors note that this was not a rigorous, in-depth analysis since random sampling was not used to select the respondents. While the findings are not particularly surprising, they reinforce the view that Facebook users are willing to provide personal information without having a good understanding of how apps may use it. This paper will be of interest to readers who want to learn about the privacy risks associated with apps that access and exchange users’--and perhaps their friends’--profile information.