CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society85.2% 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 advertisingoption 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.Figure 36. MySpace information behaviour #187