CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societyproblem or hardly think of it as a problem, was assessed with an index that weconstructed based on the results of five interval-scaled questions.1 2 3 4 5 6(20) If you have nothing illegal to hide, then you need not be afraid ofsurveillance.(21) I trust that social networking platforms such as studiVZ, MySpace, orFacebook deal in a responsible way with my data.(22) In Austria, there are only few laws that allow the surveillance ofInternet and phone communication. Citizens are therefore well protectedfrom state surveillance.(23) Firms have a strong interest in gathering personal data of Internetusers.(24) State surveillance of citizens has increased after the terrorist attacks inNew York on September 11, 2001.1…I completely disagree, 6…I fully agreeTable 4. Questions on which the surveillance critique index is basedThe index can be calculated by the following formula:Surveillance Critique Index = ( 6 - value(20) ) + ( 6 - value(21) ) + ( 6 - value(22) ) +value (23) – 1 + value(24) - 10-5: uncritical of surveillance society6-10: hardly critical of surveillance society11-15: modest criticism of surveillance society16-20: rather critical of surveillance society21-25: critical of surveillance societyFor answering research questions 3 and 4, we can make use of the results obtained forthe surveillance knowledge index and the surveillance critique index.For each of the three relevant ISNS (studiVZ, Facebook, MySpace), we asked questionsabout students’ knowledge of privacy policy and terms of use as well as theiradvertising settings. For answering research question 5, the socio-demographic factors,the surveillance knowledge index, and the critique of surveillance index are correlatedwith the knowledge about privacy policy and terms of use and with the advertisingsettings. These correlations are carried out separately for each of the three platforms.47