Privacy and Perceptions: How Facebook Advertising Affects its Users

24 — The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications • Vol. 1, No. 1 • Winter 2010

Privacy and Perceptions:
How Facebook Advertising Affects its Users
Katherine K. Roberts*
Strategic Communications
Elon University

Abstract
This research paper details a study of Facebook users and their perception of advertising on the site.
Characteristics such as privacy, micro targeting, Facebook use, awareness, and reactions, were all important factors that influenced these responses. The objective of this study was to see how undergraduate students from four colleges across the country view Facebook and its advertisers. The results indicated that student reactions did not overwhelmingly lean in a particular direction: Individual users perceive the site differently, and this determination directly correlates with the uses and gratification theory.

I. Introduction
Facebook Overview
Facebook is a social networking site (SNS), which provides users with a platform to create a personal profile page, add ‘friends’, and send messages. Since the company was founded in 2004, it has become the top ranked social networking site (Kazeniac, 2009). According to Facebook Statistics (2009), there are over
300 million current active users (i.e. users that have logged-on in the past 30 days). Facebook users have claimed the site a “necessity, along the lines of oxygen, water, and food” (Verna, 2009). For many people, visiting Facebook has become an integral part of their daily lives, and has even caused some to have an unhealthy obsession with the site. According to Elizabeth Cohen (2009), a CNN medical correspondent, therapists are seeing more and more “Facebook addicts,” who become compulsive Facebook users to the point where the site interferes with relationships, jobs, and normal daily life. The site has transformed social communication in the 21st century, with Facebook and other SNS reaching hundreds of millions of people across the globe.
Features

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