Social Media and Privacy Awareness in Turkey

Internet usage has increased in the world with the developing technology. People spend most of their time on social media while using the internet. Turkey is located in the top rankings of social media usage. So that, the number of social media accounts per person is almost 10 in Turkey. With the new media mentality, people share their private information such as visited places(locations), education information, business information, family photos, home addresses, phone numbers, interiors of their homes, etc. on their publicly open social media accounts. Even if the shared information is deleted from social media accounts, it is stored somewhere under the name of Big Data. Accordingly, these shares may cause some privacy problems. The aim of the thesis was explaining possible privacy problems that can occur due to social media, taking a look at the protective regulations such as GDPR and its effects, examining the most used social media sites in Turkey (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat ). Furthermore, the other aim of the thesis was measuring the privacy awareness of Turkish people on social media. For this purpose, users were asked questions about awareness of surveillance on social media, awareness of privacy disclosure on social media, and awareness of privacy violation on social media with the online survey method. Social media usage information and the purpose of using social media of Turkish users, what kind of personal information is being shared by Turkish people and the knowledge levels about privacy policies of social media sites and protective laws, has tried to measure with online survey. As this research will help to understand the Turkish users' concerns on social media, this research can help to prevent possible privacy problems in the future and to investigate which protection ways Turkish users are applying.