Analysis of privacy in online social networks of runet

Abstract

In recent years, social networking sites (SNSs) gained high popularity among Internet users as they combine the best of both worlds: befriending people outside real life situations and staying in touch with people already known. An im-portant aspect of any SNS is user profiles, which allow users to virtually publish anything about themselves, including highly personal or sensitive information. With the inception of SNSs, the problem of personal information disclosure and privacy implications has turned into a serious issue. While<br />privacy issues in SNSs have been extensively analyzed in the past five years showcasing agships of "western" SNSs like Facebook and MySpace, SNSs that target mainly Russianspeaking audiences are not yet analyzed and demand investigation. The goals of this paper are twofold: (1) to raise the awareness of the public to the problems of information revelation by studying the amount and type of information disclosed by users of Runet (Russian Segment of the Internet) SNSs (2) to compare our findings to the results of previous studies in the context of "western" SNSs. We investigate different aspects of information revelation of more than 30 million user profiles collected from five Runet SNSs considered in this paper. In addition, we conducted a survey among a Russian speaking population to assess both the level of awareness of the privacy issues and the level of trust, and compared the results to previous studies. While the results indicate that Runet users tend to disclose less information and are more concerned about privacy implications, there is still a substantial gap between western and Runet SNS providers in understanding of privacy implications and implementation of security measures, which leads to exposure of extensive amounts of personal information.