According to a recent study by GfK NOP, people are more comfortable sharing their online profile with strangers on LinkedIn than on Facebook.
Almost 1,000 UK adults were surveyed and the results revealed that 44% of Facebook users prefer to share only selected information with friends, with only 28% sharing everything. Only 7% share all of their online information with strangers.
However, 13% of LinkedIn users share all of their online information with strangers by opting to have open profiles and contacts. More than a third of LinkedIn users are selective over which information should be shared across various contacts.
The survey has underpinned the notion that social networkers are active in revealing aspects of themselves for specific audiences and also want to remain in control of doing so.
The majority of respondents, 78%, suggested that privacy settings on social networking sites should default to nothing being shared.
Last week Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Places, the new location based tool that allows users to give their location, similar to other networking sites such as Gowalla and Foursquare.
Interestingly, Facebook has said that the default setting for Facebook Places allows only friends of a user to see location information, whilst updated privacy settings will let users disable location functionality for third-party applications or tagging.
