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The recent emergence and rapid diffusion of social networking sites across the globe in the last two decades have been astounding. Today, we not only observe global social network providers such as Facebook, but regional or country-level providers such as Qzone (China), Sina Weibo (China), Odnoklassniki (Russia and former Soviet Republics), and Zoo.gr (Greece). This rapid diffusion brought with it many concerns, such as personal data privacy, given that the earlier social network sites tend to have minimal privacy controls (Post and Walchli, 2014). While some of these privacy concerns are originated from the social network sites' actions, such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal (Isaak & Hanna, 2018) and Facebook Newsfeed and Beacon issues (Schwartz, 2012, September 25), others are caused by the perceptions of the users (Hoadley, Xu, Lee and Rosson, 2010). Garfinkel (2000) argues that individuals' privacy is essentially “dead” in the 21st century, with the advent of sophisticated databases and related information technologies. One can say that social networking sites (SNS) have become one of these platforms, where an individual's personal information can be acquired, stored, and tracked from the cradle to the grave. Social networking sites enable people to develop and maintain relationships as well as express themselves via information sharing (French & Read, 2013). Given its growing dominance (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, and Borgatti, 2014; Zhang, Wang, and Xu, 2011), understanding the information privacy and disclosure within the social network context is an essential and critical undertaking.
The majority of the studies related to privacy within the context of information systems are limited to the respondents within the U.S. and utilize student populations (Alashoor, Han, & Joseph, 2017; Miltgen and Peyrat-Guillard, 2014; Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2020). Therefore, there is a need to conduct more studies covering this phenomenon at an international level, utilizing diverse respondents. Furthermore, Zhang et al. (2011) warn that the findings of the privacy-related research conducted within the context of information technology (in this case, e-commerce) would not be sufficient to address the privacy-related concerns and behaviors specific to other technologies such as social network sites. Xu, Teo, Tan, and Agarwal (2012) echo the advice above and emphasize the need for researchers to examine consumers' privacy concerns and behaviors specific to a particular context, such as social media and peer-to-peer communication technologies. Li, Cheng, and Teng (2020) emphasize that personal information disclosure in social networking sites continues to be one of the most critical issues in the information management arena.