CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societyabout surveillance if it immediately concerns technologies that they use very frequentlythan about general policies that set legal conditions for surveillance. studiVZ in itsprivacy policy says that it stores protocol data up to six months (§4), even after a profilehas been deleted. In its terms of use, studiVZ specifies that it deletes account data andpersonal information of users as soon as a profile has been deactivated. The Facebookprivacy policy says that data can be stored for an unspecified amount of time after usershave deactivated their profiles. MySpace’s privacy policy says that MySpace continuesto store personally identifiable information (name, email, address, phone number,credit card number) after profile deletion for judicial reasons. This shows that to variousdegrees user data are stored after profiles are deleted. Although there are differences indegree, all three platforms that are relevant for this study store some data about usersafter they have deactivated their profiles. By combining the answers to all threequestions to one surveillance knowledge index, one sees that 16.5% (0 correct answers)of the respondents have no, 65.3% (1 correct answer) little, 16.5% (2 correct answers)average, and 1.8% (3 correct answers) high knowledge of surveillance (figure 15). Themedian of the surveillance knowledge index is 1 (little knowledge of surveillance).Figure 12. Knowledge of surveillance #155