Awareness on privacy settings in Social Networking Sites among the undergraduates in Eastern University, Sri Lanka

Use of Social networking sites (SNS) have grown rapidly over the past decades. Users occupy more time on social networking sites than other recreational activities. However, the tremendous use of Social Networking Sites is thereby prone to privacy concerns and risks. Therefore, a study was intended in an attempt to identify the reasons for using Social Networking Sites, examine the level of awareness of users on privacy settings, privacy policy and risk of avoiding privacy settings and to determine the training needs on the usage of Social Networking Sites among undergraduates of Eastern University, Sri Lanka. A cross-sectional survey design was employed to derive responses from a sample size of 391 undergraduates from the Eastern University, Sri Lanka selected through stratified random sampling. The present study revealed that the highest percentages of the undergraduates use SNS for Information sharing (93.07%) and for Academic purposes (92%), which was followed by Social interaction (86.13%), Entertainment (85.33%) and Self-Expression (81.87%). It was noted that only 15% of the respondents have awareness about privacy policy at an excellent level. Moreover, around 20.06% and 24.13% of the undergraduates have marked their awareness level on privacy policy at a good and satisfactory level respectively. The overall median percentage for awareness about the privacy policy, settings, and associated risk is 58.33%, 66.7%, and 66.7% respectively. Results revealed that municipality and faculty has a significant influence on awareness on privacy setting in SNS (p < 0.05) and the urban has highest median awareness (70%) than rural (58.6%). The majority of the respondents confirmed that they required training on control cybercrimes (51.47%) followed by SNS in higher education (48.8%). It was recommended that university authorities should organize user education programmes to enhance knowledge of students on privacy settings in social networking sites as well as facilitators should assist students in incorporating them into their learning activities in a coherent way.