Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Essay 3: Privacy-related behavior through activation and inhibition systems 
The third essay that Hammer writes in his research is about privacy as a behavior that 
can be activated or inhibited by one’s psychological system. In this essay, he views privacy 
as a non-conscious element of the human brain. Therefore, it cannot be studied through the 
normal research tools such as surveys. He says that privacy can be studied using 
psychophysiological tools and also implicit associations. He explains the reasons why he 
views privacy as a psychological issue. In his explanation, it is human behavior that 
influences whether one will share or withhold certain information. He says that one will be 
non-hesitant to share certain information with a friend and will be completely unwilling to 
share the same information with a stranger. He says that there is a sensory process behind the 
motivation and demotivation to share information with. 
In his study, he used headsets to measure psychophysiological activities in the brain, 
eye trackers, screen recorders, and cameras. The participants first fill out a questionnaire just 

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to get them accustomed to the sensors and also to give out information relating to any 
disorders they might have that may influence the study's results. After this, the participants 
are asked questions that put them into a situation where they have to share their information. 
They are constrained towards sharing the information on two platforms, Amazon and 
Facebook. They are given scenarios that involve the sharing of either highly-sensitive or 
lowly-sensitive information on both platforms and asked whether they would share the 
information. In between scenarios, participants are distracted with some other tasks such as 
solving simple math problems. The types of information that the participants are asked on 
whether they would share include credit card numbers, account balances, debts, gender, real 
names and their physical address.
In the results, the psychophysiological tools were able to determine the subconscious 
operation of privacy through an approach-avoidance mechanism. It was visible that the 
participants showed approach when asked to share lowly sensitive data. However, they were 
more cognitively involved and more withdrawn towards sharing highly sensitive information. 
Participants were more withdrawn towards sharing highly sensitive information on Amazon 
than on Facebook. Hammer says that his tools were able to study the participants 
longitudinally rather than in a snapshot. Therefore, the results arrived at had the element of 
accuracy. They also proved that privacy is a subconscious element of the human brain. 
In conclusion to this work of literature, it can be seen that Hammer did an expansive 
research on the topic of social media privacy. He incorporated three researches into one paper 
to bring out a thorough understanding of users on the issue of privacy. His three different 
takes on privacy from the eyes of the users are instrumental to this thesis. Therefore, his work 
will be highly regarded and some arguments in the thesis will be born out of the information 
gotten in his paper.

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