Gamification, the use of game design elements in applications that are not games, has been developed to provide attractive environments and maintain user interest in several domains. In domains such as education, marketing and health, where gamification techniques are applied, user engagement in applications has increased. In these applications the protection of users’ privacy is an important aspect to consider, due to the applications obtaining a record of the personal information of their users. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify if applications where gamification is applied do respect users’ privacy. For the accomplishment of this aim, two main steps have been implemented. Since the main principle of gamification is the existence of game elements, the first step was to identify the set of game elements recorded in the literature that are commonly applied in various applications. Afterwards, an examination of the relationship between these elements and privacy requirements was implemented in order to identify which elements conflict with the privacy requirements leading to potential privacy violations and which elements do not. Α conceptual model according to the results of this examination was designed, which presents how elements conflict with requirements. Based on the results, there are indeed game elements which can lead to privacy violations. The results of this work provide valuable guidance to software developers, especially during the design stages of gamified applications since it helps them to consider the protection of users’ privacy in parallel from the early stages of the application development onwards.

Drawing on digital identity theories, social software engineering theory (SSE), and the Privacy Safeguard (PriS) methodology, we examined the way that personal information uploaded on social media (SM) imposes privacy issues. Throughout a review on users’ self-representation on SM, we examined the impact of self-determination and self-disclosure on users’ privacy, and we identified the social attributes (SA) that cause privacy implications. This paper specifies 18 SA that users employ to achieve their optimal level of representation while summarizing possible ways that these attributes provoke users’ identification. In particular, our research has shown that SM users represent their personas by unveiling SA to construct popular, representative, and conversational profiles. As disclosing SA increases privacy implications, we intend to help users build profiles that respect their privacy. Examining users’ SA deepens our understanding of disclosing personal information on SM while leading to a better quantification of identity attributes; furthermore, users’ top five most revealing attributes were summarized. Considering that SSE addresses users’ privacy implications from an early stage of systems designing, our research, identifying the SA, will be helpful in addressing privacy from a socio-technical aspect, aiming at bridging the socio-technical gap by drawing designers’ attention to users’ social aspects.

Purpose: Even though social media are nowadays used in the frame of public governance to ensure citizens’ major participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, this utilization has not been expanded yet in the field of education, whose key role focuses on the cultivation of active citizenship, as it is promoted through participation. The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership’s views of Greek Secondary and Tertiary Education on the potential use of social media for participatory decision-making processes in order to identify if the e-participation model could be implemented in the Greek education field as in other public domains.Design/methodology/approach: An exploratory research was elaborated, employing a survey design of quantitative method in order to explore Greek educational organizations leadership’s perspectives toward social media usage in participatory decision-making processes.Findings: The research reveals Greek educational leadership’s positive view on the potential effects of social media usage in participatory decision-making processes and highlights anticipated benefits as well as problems to be faced, indicating the foundation for Greek leaders to implement social media in their leadership practices and exploit their affordances as in e-governance shifts.Practical implications: Bringing the concept of e-participation and crowd sourcing model – key features in e-governance initiatives through social media usage – in education field, Greek educational leadership is informed to consider social media utilization more methodically in the context of participatory decision-making processes, updating simultaneously existing leadership practices.Originality/value: Up till now, social media usage in participatory decision-making processes in educational settings has hardly received attention.

Nowadays, location-sharing applications (LSA) within social media enable users to share their location information at different levels of precision. Users on their side are willing to disclose this kind of information in order to represent themselves in a socially acceptable online way. However, they express privacy concerns regarding potential malware location-sharing applications, since users’ geolocation information can provide affiliations with their social identity attributes that enable the specification of their behavioral normativity, leading to sensitive information disclosure and privacy leaks. This paper, after a systematic review on previous social and privacy location research, explores the overlapping of these fields in identifying users’ social attributes through examining location attributes while online, and proposes a targeted set of location privacy attributes related to users’ socio-spatial characteristics within social media.

Social Networks (SNs) bring new types of privacy risks threats for users; which developers should be aware of when designing respective services. Aiming at safeguarding users’ privacy more effectively within SNs, self-adaptive privacy preserving schemes have been developed, considered the importance of users’ social and technological context and specific privacy criteria that should be satisfied. However, under the current self-adaptive privacy approaches, the examination of users’ social landscape interrelated with their privacy perceptions and practices, is not thoroughly considered, especially as far as users’ social attributes concern. This study, aimed at elaborating this examination in depth, in order as to identify the users’ social characteristics and privacy perceptions that can affect self-adaptive privacy design, as well as to indicate self-adaptive privacy related requirements that should be satisfied for users’ protection in SNs. The study was based on an interdisciplinary research instrument, adopting constructs and metrics from both sociological and privacy literature. The results of the survey lead to a pilot taxonomic analysis for self-adaptive privacy within SNs and to the proposal of specific privacy related requirements that should be considered for this domain. For further establishing of our interdisciplinary approach, a case study scenario was formulated, which underlines the importance of the identified self-adaptive privacy related requirements. In this regard, the study provides further insight for the development of the behavioral models that will enhance the optimal design of self-adaptive privacy preserving schemes in SNs, as well as designers to support the principle of PbD from a technical perspective.

Even though both internet-of-cloud services and biometric systems (BSs) are used worldwide, popular and expanded among public and private services, their utilization has not been extended among Greek users, and in particular within Greek HEIs. This paper aims to examine the University of the Aegean (UA) students’ perceptions, especially on BS acceptance, determining the impact of their sociodemographic characteristics toward this. An online instrument was developed based on constructs of technology acceptance models, and previous research focused on BS acceptance, including a great variety of sociodemographic variables. The authors collected 768 complete responses to explore the social and demographic attributes that impact on students’ BS acceptance through exploratory descriptive research. This study found that several UA students’ sociodemographic attributes are linked to their BS acceptance. Specifically, gender, age, study level, year of study, professional profile and fathers’ occupation are useful to determine which students’ groups are in favor of BS, while employment status, annual income and mothers’ occupation are weak toward this. Security and privacy concerns are indicated to influence users’ BS acceptance as well. This study provides a unique approach to better understanding the Greek students’ BS acceptance, with important implications for improved BS marketing in Greece in synergy with the internet-of-cloud services and their potential adoption in HEIs internal settings. It also provides developers with further knowledge for security and privacy non-functional requirements in order to increase users’ acceptance and to address these challenges within the internet of cloud.