For people that use Facebook and Google+

I am taking a course on the topic of privacy where we are primary look at online privacy and how to protect your privacy. For our course project, we have to write a paper on a topic about privacy. I want to investigate if Google+ actually makes users more privacy conscience then Facebook. In order to do this, I plan on looking at 35 people's Facebook and Google+ profiles without friending them. From there, I will compare the information available from each and determine what exposes more information about the user. As I write up the paper, I will not be including any information about the users in my paper. I will just be discussing my results.

If anyone has both a Facebook and Google+ account who would be willing to help me, could you please pm me a link to both your accounts. 

Thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Head Injury 

I would look up 35 people you don't know and have never contacted. That might ensure a more random sample.

I will probably have to resort to this. However, it is against IRB policies to perform an experiment without getting consent from the participants. Even though this paper will not be published, I figured I would try to do it the correct way before doing this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Magedark 

And what makes you think if we give you our links we won't just up and change our security settings right then and there .

As I talked about above, I have to inform the participants of what I am doing. This is a risk that I have to accept. Since, it is not being published, I don't really care to be honest if this can happen.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by beamthegreat 

lol. As if anyone will be stupid enough to give you their account infos.

It is not as if I am asking for a user name and password. I am asking for a link to your public profile. 
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Head Injury 

I'm unfamiliar with that sort of thing, but wouldn't this count as a survey and not an experiment? You could keep the sources anonymous and code for different levels of security rather than release specifics.

 

Alternatively you could gather the information, then ask the subjects if you can use it in your study. If they say no, discard it. Gather first so they don't change anything, though.

Even surveys require informing the parties, etc. There are really strict standards for research when it involves people. Thankfully, I am not trying to get this published or else I would need to take specific classes on this process and go through a formal review. The plan all along was to keep everything anonymous and not release specific information. I have started started the process of collecting data of 'random' profiles.