Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Essay 2: Reconceptualizing privacy through social network analysis 
Hammer introduces this essay with a question as to why users share their personal 
information and at the same time want privacy. To explain the reason, he begins by 
explaining that social media activities occur between entities and these entities mostly have 
some sort of a relationship. In some incidents, this relationship is one-dimensional, especially 
in the cases of forum posts. The aspects of relationships have not been looked at in privacy 
literature, he says. He exclaims that this is despite the fact that social media sites are 
characterized by richer relationships than other types of sites such as e-commerce stores. The 

---

33 
relationships in the sites influence the way users act on social media and on other types of 
websites. He then introduces the research to multiplexity, social norms, and moral influence 
on user privacy concerns. In this essay, he focuses on investigating the reasons why the 
relationships on social media platforms cause users to lay low their privacy concerns and 
share their personal information.
Hammer first refers to another research paper that gave meaningful categorizations of 
the conceptualizations of privacy. The paper gave two categories: value-based, which views 
privacy from an ethical lens, and cognate-based, which views privacy as a cognitive 
phenomenon in one’s brain. He elucidates these conceptualizations, starting with the first one 
where he says the EU acts as a block to protect its users’ privacy from third-party sites while 
the US does not. This is a real-life view of the conceptualization of privacy as a value that is 
recognized by some institutions such as the EU. As for cognate-based conceptualization, he 
says that privacy is viewed as an abstraction that exists outside institutions and is fully under 
the control of an individual user.
Hammer then explains the need to belong theory, which explains a user’s interest in 
being in a relationship with others or being part of a group. This is characterized by frequent 
interactions and reciprocity of each other’s welfare. Social media sites cater for these two by 
giving users multiple ways to start interactions with other users and many ways for other 
users to respond to an interaction. He then explains multiplexity of relationships as the 
different direct ties between people in a relationship. He explains that social media sites 
encourage the formation of multiplexity of relationships. This makes users feel more secure 
to share details with other users since they are in a rich relationship with them and have 
several ties built over time on the platform. In his study for this essay, he investigates whether 
an increase in multiplexity of a social media relationship leads to more trust among the 

---

34 
affected users. In his second hypothesis, he seeks to know whether multiplexity in a 
relationship leads to a decrease of privacy concerns between users in the relationship.
In his research, he selects a sample of student-run Facebook groups from a US 
university. These groups were games-related and had been created by students that had 
something in common such as graduating, being ineligible to play, being injured, and so on. 
The study was conducted through interviews with the individual group members, mainly to 
determine their relationship with some other group members and what they could share with 
them. In the results and discussion, it was determined that the type of relationship that a user 
had with another or several others influenced the type of information they could share. Those 
that had relationships with multiplexity were found to share more highly sensitive 
information with other users. This research, therefore, introduced another dynamic in privacy, 
multiplexity in relationships.