PRIVACY ISSUES IN SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: A STUDY OF USERS IN KOLHAPUR AND SANGLI DISTRICTS

Social networking software is still in its adolescence. Users are becoming sophisticated enough to realise that there is little point in bringing people together just for the sake of bringing people together and they are demanding more. Nevertheless, it is an appealing and engaging environment once users have found their tribe. But it has been observed that security and privacy issues have not been seriously handled by these social networking sites. For example some sites are allowing their third parties to access the personal information of their users without bothering of the privacy. The list of the privacy risks with undesired access to profile information is continuously growing from the identity theft, spam to cyber bullying.Users need to be careful with what and how they reveal details of themselves. The challenge for users is to learn to judge precisely the amount of information they should divulge to attract a similar person and the amount they should reveal to protect themselves from exploitation.