Students across the country should think before they post, as many may be sharing far more than they intend on Facebook, a Columbia University study suggests.
Columbia researchers Michelle Madejski, Maritza Johnson and Steven Bellovin conducted a study indicating that the privacy settings of the popular social networking site may be misleading or ineffective.
The study surveyed students on the different types of information they listed in their profiles and whether they were comfortable with strangers, friends or a more selective group viewing this knowledge.
Categories surveyed included occupation, sexuality, interests and religion. Students were instructed to adjust the privacy settings on their account in order to share information with the groups that they approved.
However, the results of the study indicated that 93.8 percent of students saw what they considered to be violations of their requested privacy settings, while 84.6 percent said that information they wanted to share was being blocked.
The researchers believe the problem lies in privacy settings being too closely tied to specific categories. For instance, while users could specify that their relationship status be kept private from everyone but their close friends, a status update or tagged post could give unwanted viewers the same information.
In addition, there is no effective way to block references to alcohol or drug use, a matter of concern for many students whose profile may be viewed by employers or family members, the study said.
The report suggests that the implementation of a text-based search mechanism that could identify posts containing a variety of content specified by users might alleviate some of the concerns.
Facebook’s privacy policy strives for “a safe, efficient and customized experience,” according to the site. However, many students said they feel little changes have made in the past few years relating to blocking out individual users from specific information.
“I’m surprised because I have pretty much all the major settings set on my Facebook and apparently I’m impossible to find,” said Catherine Wood, a freshman in the College of Communication. “They say you have all these privacy settings, but you don’t really know how well they’re working.”
Other students said they think the current privacy settings are fine and users themselves should be showing more vigilance.
“It’s worked well for me,” said Mariah Hecker, a sophomore in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. “I haven’t put anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t want other people to see. Anything you put up there can potentially be seen by someone you don’t want to.”
Some students said personal information is inherently difficult to conceal once it is put online.
“I feel like all information now is hard to keep private,” said Spencer Li, a freshman in the School of Management. “Once you put it up its hard to take down. People always complain about getting random cell phone calls after they put their number up, but anything you post is fair game.”
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