Attitude of Jordanian youth over violation of others' privacy through social media and web applications: A field study

Abstract

Social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and the WhatsApp application are a major source at present to learn about the most important events and use them to publish or re-publish the information. The problem of maintaining the privacy of individuals is one of the issues under discussion at present, especially in light of the technical development and the attempt to legalize the use of these sites in some countries. Therefore, the current study seeks to identify the motives of violating the privacy of others using social networks and applications, while providing solution to this matter from the viewpoint of Jordanian youth.

The research adopts descriptive survey approach, given the relevance of this approach to the nature of the study and its objectives. The study sample consisted of (680) male and female students from governmental and private universities in Jordan, who were randomly selected, to fill the electronic questionnaire for the study. The most prominent results of the study are: 1- Some of the Jordanian youth feel that their privacy has been violated by the use of social media; 2-and the motives for violating their rights were between insulting others with the intention to discredit them, then the lack of religious and moral values, material extortion and entertainment; 3-and the most common methods used in violating privacy were using personal photos (50.3%); 4-with a high rate of following social networks among Jordanian university youth by (89.3%); 5-while a third of the respondents admitted that they are following social sites as a way of imitating the groups to which they belong. The study recommended the necessity of activating the laws that punish violators and paying attention to spreading concepts of media education and how to use the Internet, its sites and applications in an optimal way.