Volume 10, Number 1

Security and Privacy Perceptions among Female Online Social Media Users: A Case Study of Bangladesh

  Authors

Farida Chowdhury, Sadia Sultana and Mahruba Sharmin Chowdhury, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh

  Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook are extremely popular in Bangladesh, not only to the younger generations, but also to the people from other age categories as well. However, due to different socio-technological factors, the security and privacy awareness of Bangladeshi Facebook users have remained questionable. This is also evident in the wake of a number of incidents reported while using Facebook, particularly involving women users. There have been a few research studies to investigate different security and privacy concerns of Bangladeshi users. However, none of the existing has is comprehensive enough focusing only on female users. In this paper, we aim to fill in this gap by presenting a study on security and privacy concerns while using different Online Social Networks such as Facebook among female users in Bangladesh. We conducted an online survey of 203 Bangladeshi female Facebook users. We analyzed the survey statistics to study the general trend of behavior, practices, and expectations pertaining to secure Facebook usage and different privacy preferences. The study reveals that female users are concerned about their data privacy, however, 67% participants feel safe and secure while using Facebook and 33% participants do not think that Facebook takes necessary steps to protect users’ data privacy on the web. We suggest that such a study can help researchers identify the privacy concerns in using social networking sites/apps such as Facebook to focus on building secure and privacy-friendly technologies to protect users from online crimes and harassment in developing countries.

  Keywords

Online Social Networks, Facebook, Security, Privacy, Survey.