The immense popularity gained by facebook in social media world has led millions of developers to develop application for facebook, also termed as third party applications. These applications are useful, fun, educational and entertaining. There is also massive amount of personal user data in facebook which makes it a prime target for spammers, marketing agencies etc... It has come to surface that propagation of personal user data is being practiced by most of these third party applications. This research is to study why people uses third party applications even when there are risk of personal data being stolen or sold to some other agencies or entities and to see if the users are aware of the security issues involved while using such applications. To find the answer for this study, we have built our hypothesis around four factors social influence, social benefit, self-benefit and brand loyalty which could possibly influence a user to use an application. We conducted the survey and received 302 responses. The respondents were asked to answer the same question twice once before reading about the risk associated in information and privacy issues and once after the users read the story. We conducted regression analysis to test our hypothesis and found out that social influence plays an important role in affecting user’s attitude towards facebook applications.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Chulalongkorn University, 2013