Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

The third viewpoint: The subconscious privacy mechanism 
Hammer insists that till today, there have been challenges in defining what privacy is. 
He says that there has not yet been an agreed upon answer and, therefore, privacy is 
conceptualized as a right, a commodity, a state, or a control. In a search for the right 
definition, Hammer switches to neuroscience and psychophysiology. He says that privacy as 
a behavior is characterized by how one shares or withdraws from sharing some information. 
It is an approach-avoidance behavior where approach behavior is exhibited to get a positive 

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result whereas avoidance behavior is exhibited to avoid a negative result. With this view, 
Hammer says that privacy can then only be studied using psychophysiological tools, since 
approach-avoidance behavior is exhibited at an unconscious level. Therefore, a survey would 
not be effective at showing this. While laying his arguments, Hammer says that the 
individuals with the approach behavior are more likely to share their personal information on 
social media than those with an avoidance behavior. To test the psychology behind privacy, 
Hammer uses some psychophysiological tools to monitor heart rates of participants while 
immersed in Facebook-like scenarios. 
Hammer breaks his research into three essays based on the three viewpoints 
introduced above. The following are the essays that make up the major part of his research: 
 
Essay 1: Varying information sensitivity of personal information 
In the introduction to this essay, Hammer highlights that privacy management has 
been a topic of interest due to the wide adoption of IT into people’s lives. It is this adoption 
that has seen people share out a lot of their information, something they would traditionally 
avoid doing. A question of interest he poses in this essay is why an individual would give up 
his or her privacy on social media sites. He explains that in social media sites, users ought to 
understand that it is the data that they share with other users that is mined by the platforms for 
more personalized adverts, marketing for partners and even customizations for third-party 
sites. Platforms such as Facebook will scrap all usable information from posts, messages, and 
sites visited by a user, and even photos posted (with their face recognition engine). Due to 
this, Hammer says that Facebook is only motivated towards encouraging users to share out 
their information. This is what is good for business. If users stop sharing the information, 
Facebook’s business will be immensely affected. 

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Hammer says that privacy organizations have faulted the likes of Facebook for not 
providing users with sufficient privacy controls. The organizations have further stated that the 
attempts by social media companies to enhance their privacy controls have not been 
satisfactory and more still needs to be done. Hammer, however, believes that there is a 
misunderstanding due to the context of social media. It is unexpected that Facebook can 
match the privacy levels of a site such as Amazon. The users on those sites have different 
expectations. For Amazon, the users will appreciate to know that their purchase history is 
safe, their payment details are confidential and their delivery addresses are never disclosed to 
the public. Facebook users, on the other hand, want to post messages to other users, upload 
new photos, chat with friends, like and comment on photos of friends and family as well as 
read the comments on their own photos. The interactions described show that users in 
Facebook want to continuously engage with other users by means of sharing some 
information. They are looking for the social experiences, they want the enjoyment and 
satisfaction derived from those actions. Privacy is, therefore, not comparable between social 
media sites and e-commerce stores. 
Hammer also introduces the issue of the types of relationships on social media. He 
gives another e-commerce example where he says that a transaction between the vendor and 
the customer involves some privacy concerns. The customer is very concerned about the 
privacy of his/her personal details, and this will form the basis of the relationship between the 
customer and the social media site. On social media, the information shared is mostly 
intended to reach particular persons. Therefore, privacy concerns in social media are context-
specific and they also depend on the agent a user interacted with and the type of information 
that was shared. Hammer chooses to focus on the type and the sensitivity of information 
shared on social media.

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In his research for this essay, Hammer chooses Facebook as the testing platform. He 
says that his focus is on the user-user relationship. He poses a question about how privacy 
influences the sharing of personal information in interpersonal relationships. He brings up 
three points: how privacy differs in process-oriented and outcome-oriented systems, theories 
for a better understanding of privacy, and how the sensitivity of the material to be shared 
affects how it is shared. To carry out the study for this essay, Hammer gets a focus group that 
is given information on the different sensitivity levels of information of social media. He then 
carries out a pilot study to assess the fear of social exclusion and intention. He then takes 
another sample and carries out the real experiment. 
In his findings and conclusion for this essay, Hammer says that there is a strong effect 
of interpersonal beliefs on privacy concerns. Therefore, users will share more personal 
information with the people they have strong relationships with. He also says that the fear of 
being secluded only factors into the sharing of personal information only when the 
information is of low sensitivity. Therefore, people that feel like they are secluded on social 
media will give out some information on these platforms but it will not be highly sensitive. 
Hammer believes that his study takes an often-ignored route in the research about social 
media privacy.