Perceived Internet privacy concerns on social network in Europe

The development of computing technologies and Internet has made possible to capture, save and analyse increasing mount of personal information, which might impact public concern about privacy. The present article aims at analysing Internet privacy concerns in respect to social network website. We use a well-suited dataset of 23 087 individuals collected by the European Union in 2009 in all member states. Fitting an ordered logit model, we examine the variables associated with the probability to have high privacy concerns in order to draw policy and regulatory implications. The results show that institutional framework ensuring comprehensive national efforts to safeguard privacy increases the probability to be worried about possible misuse of private data. Additionally, we observe that socio-demographic variables affect the perception of individual personal data use/misuse.