CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societythe Facebook knowledge index on the other hand. This result confirms that thesurveillance parameters have an influence on the usage of ISNS. But nonethelesscritical information behaviour on Facebook and knowledge about Facebook are rathersmall because Facebook is not so much known, and not so much discussed in personalconversations and in the public. Therefore the influence of the surveillance parametersremains limited.9.6. MySpace15.9% of the respondents in our survey use MySpace. This is a much lower numberthan in the case of studiVZ (88.3%) and a lower number than in the case of Facebook(39.5%). We combined the answers to four questions that tested the users’ knowledgeabout what MySpace is allowed to do with their data in order to calculate the MySpaceKnowledge Index. 15.8% of the MySpace users in our survey have high knowledge ofMySpace, 34.7% have good knowledge of MySpace, 43.2% have average knowledge ofMySpace, 6.3% have small knowledge of MySpace, and 0% have no knowledge ofMySpace. So 50.5% of the MySpace users in our survey have high or good knowledgeof MySpace, whereas the remaining 49.5% have average, little, or no knowledge of theplatform. In the case of Facebook, 34.1% of the users have a good or high degree ofknowledge about what Facebook is allowed to do with their data, whereas in the caseof studiVZ users, the degree of correct answers to such questions was on average 88.7%(the average of 91.8% and 85.6%). The data show that there is a large differencebetween the knowledge that users have on studiVZ and the knowledge that they haveabout MySpace and Facebook. That users know so much about studiVZ and not somuch about MySpace and Facebook can best be explained by the fact that there ismore private and public debate about studiVZ because it is the most used ISNS inAustria and Germany and by the negative media coverage and the online informationcampaign that emerged when studiVZ changed its terms of use at the beginning of2008 so that more surveillance and less privacy became possible.85.2% of the MySpace users in our survey have activated personalized advertising(figure 35), 69.7% allow all advertising companies to send them ad messages (figure36). This means that on average 22.6% opted out of advertising options on MySpace. Incomparison, on average 67.4% of the users in our survey have opted out of advertisingoptions on studiVZ and on average 35.9% of the users opted out of these options onFacebook. That users are much more critical towards advertising on studiVZ than onMySpace and Facebook can be explained by the fact that the advertising and economicsurveillance practices of studiVZ have been a public and interpersonal topic thataffected studiVZ’s image negatively, when the platform changed its terms of use at thebeginning of 2008. MySpace and Facebook are much less used, known, and discussedin Austria and Germany than in other countries like the USA or the United Kingdom.We asked the respondents what they think the greatest advantages and disadvantages,i.e. opportunities and risks, of social networking sites were with the help of two openquestions.114