Privacy Awareness on Facebook - Engagement on an International Privacy Policy

This small-scale study aims to raise some critical insights into ‘privacy awareness’, It discusses the need to set up an International Legal Framework for a Privacy Policy, which intends to protect users from disclosing personal information to the larger public, out of their control. A critical discourse analysis of Facebook ‘Data use Policy’ (2011) is targeting what FB declares as information they receive about users and the ways it is used by them and third parties. The analysis informed the drafting of a questionnaire which aimed, among other issues, to investigate the extent to which users know that i) Facebook collects data like time and place from content that users share and ii) users give Facebook permission to distribute information to third parties for developing new products and services or for advertisement by accepting the terms and conditions of ‘Facebook Data Use Policy’. The questionnaire was distributed to forty-nine Facebook users in Luxembourg. The analysis revealed that although 90% of the participants noticed the presence of user-tailored-advertisements, only 25% of them know that by accepting the terms and conditions of ‘Facebook Data Use Policy’, users give Facebook permission to distribute personal information to third parties for business purposes. While discussing some proposals and recommendations for user-based management of privacy settings, we conclude that information leakage in the form of distribution to third parties cannot be easily avoided if not by improving practices for drafting legally bounding policies. We call the attention of the scientific community for a more engaged and informed discussion concerning the setting up of an international legal framework for a privacy policy.