Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Figure 2: Shows the different sensitivity levels of different types of personal information
 

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said that they approximately spent 3-4 hours on social media every day. 12 respondents 
claimed to spend between 1 and 2 hours on social media. The rest of the respondents claimed 
to use social media platforms for over 4 hours each day. This showed that there was moderate 
to high usage of social media in the university, especially for respondents who were between 
the ages of 18 to 28 years. Concerning the reasons why they were on social media, 50% of 
the respondents claimed that it was because it was a good avenue for staying in touch with 
their friends and family. 40% said that it was because it was a good avenue for following up 
with celebrities and entertainment events. Only 10% said that they used social media for 
advertising purposes.
The third part of the interview sought to find out the attitudes of the respondents 
towards privacy policies. The respondents were asked whether they took the time to read 
privacy policies of different social media platforms. Shockingly, 70% of the respondents had 
never read even a single line of the privacy policies. This is despite them having agreed to the 
terms and conditions as they signed up on the social media platforms. Only 30% said that 
they did read some parts of the terms and conditions of the social media platforms. From this 
30%, 5% of them had actually read the entire privacy policies of the social media platforms 
that they were active on. The major complaint about not reading the privacy policies was 
because they saw them be too wordy, with 10% claiming that they simply did not have the 
time to read the policies as they signed up.
The fourth part of the interview asked the users about who they thought the 
responsibility of ensuring safety on the social media platforms lied on. 31 of the 50 
respondents said that they believed that the responsibility of security majorly fell on the 
social media platforms. This was because they were just mere users and as such it was upon 
the social media platforms to protect their privacy. 20% of the remaining respondents said 
that it was upon their government to ensure that they were safe on social media by imposing 

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the relevant legislations. 18% said that the responsibility of safety fell on them. They 
attributed this to the failures of the social media platforms and governments to protect the 
privacy of users and even at times being the enemies of this privacy. 9 respondents claimed 
that they did monitor whatever they shared on the Internet and particularly on social media 
platforms.