Information systems security practices in social software applications. A systematic literature review
| Date | 20 March 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2016-0124 |
| Pages | 131-157 |
| Published date | 20 March 2017 |
| Author | Suraya Ika Tamrin,Azah Anir Norman,Suraya Hamid |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Information systems security
practices in social
software applications
A systematic literature review
Suraya Ika Tamrin, Azah Anir Norman and Suraya Hamid
Department of Information Systems,
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology,
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper to investigate the current information systems security (ISS) practices
of the social software application (SSA) users via the internet.
Design/methodology/approach –The paper optedfor a systematic literaturereview survey on ISS and its
practices in SSAs between 2010 and 2015. The study includesa set of 39 papers from among 1,990 retrieved
papers published in 35 high-impact journals. The selected papers were filtered using the Publish or Perish
softwareby Harzing and Journal CitationReport ( JCR) with an inclusioncriterion of least one citationper article.
Findings –The practice of ISS is driven by the need to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability
of the data from being tampered. It is coherent with the current practice as reported by many researchers in
this study. Four important factors lead to the ISS practice in SSA: protection tools offered, ownership, user
behaviour, and security policy.
Practical implications –The paper highlights the implication of successful ISS practices is having clear
security purpose and security supported environment (user behaviour and security protection tools) and
governance (security policy and ownership) protection tools offered, ownership, user behaviour, and security
policy towards ISS practice by the users.
Originality/value –This paper fulfils an identified need to study how to enable ISS practice.
Keywords Availability, Integrity, Systematic literature review, Confidentiality,
Information systems security practice, Social software applications
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Social network sites (SNSs), also known as social software applications (SSAs), are defined
as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile
within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection,
and view and navigate their list of connections and those made by others within the system
(Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Through these SSAs, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and
LinkedIn, individuals are given the opportunity to share their valuable thoughts
and information with a wider audience with different demographics. They also allow users
to receive updates about upcoming events in their local societies or in the world. For these
reasons, SSAs have become a very popular tool for interaction in today’s society.
Additionally, a summary of SSA literature review was found and all of them were published
in the period between 2007 and 2012. Those are presented in Table I in chronological order
to take the reader from the oldest to the most recent (Altamimi, 2013).
The terms of social media, social networking application, and mobile messenger referring
to applications such as WhatsApp and Messenger, have been widely used for a number of
years. However, there are inconsistencies in the usage of these terms that may cause
confusion. Sometimes, social media is treated as the general term for social networks sites Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 69 No. 2, 2017
pp. 131-157
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-08-2016-0124
Received 9 August 2016
Revised 8 December 2016
2 February 2017
Accepted 22 February 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by UMRG Programme 2013, University
of Malaya (RP004E –13HNE).
131
ISS practices
in SSAs
such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube (Leonardi et al., 2013; Gao et al., 2011).
At other times, the term social networking application refers to mobile messaging
applications such as WhatsApp, TweetBot, Hangouts, and Vine within the context of
smartphones. However, it is useful to simply apply the term SSA to refer to the entire range
of available social software, such as social networks, social news outlets, media sharing
sites, mobile messengers, blogs and wikis, that can be accessed through all mediums of
communication such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Therefore, in this paper, the
term SSA refers to any social software, including social networks, which serve as social sites
that provide services for connecting with other users (Grahl, 2014; Water et al., 2009), and
mobile messengers, which provide instant messaging for smartphones.
In recent years, the number of SSA users has been rapidly expanding. As reported by
ComScore, SSAs such as Facebook and Twitter are now used by 84 per cent of the world’s
online population, and thus 1.3billion users around the world (ComScore, 2015). Meanwhile, in
2011, eMarketer predicted that the number of SSA users around the world would rise from
1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion in 2013, an 18 per cent increase (eMarketer, 2013). By 2017,
the global SSA users’population will total 2.55 billion (eMarketer, 2013). Facebook, for
instance, has more than 400 million active users and hosts more than 25 billion pieces of
contents areshared each month (Li and Chen, 2010).This statistic shows thatSSAs are widely
accepted and used by today’ssociety.
Reference Period
No. of
articles Type of sources Databases Keywords Focus area
Dwivedi et al.
(2007)
n/a n/a Journals, periodicals,
blogs, message-
boards andconsumer
review sites
n/a n/a Hotel
industry
Secker (2008) Up until 2007 n/a n/a LISA, LISTA
and ERIC
n/a Library
community
Shailey (2009) Up until 2009 n/a n/a n/a n/a Education
Zyl (2009) n/a n/a Journal articles,
white papers,
popular media and
books
n/a n/a Electronic
Social
Networking
in
Organizations
Adams (2010) 2006-2008 56+6
blogs
+1
Wiki
Journals, conference
proceedings, trade
publications and
book series+Blogs
+Wiki
Scopus,
Elsevier
PubMed and
Google
Scholar
“Web 2.0”,“Web Log”,
“Weblog”“Blog”
Singularly and in
combination with
patient, health and
medicine
“Second Generation
Web”,“Wiki”“Health
2.0”,“Medicine 2.0”
Online
Health
Wilson et al.
(2011)
n/a 114
articles
Academic, crossover
(outlets at
intersection between
academia and
practice), and
practitioner
EBSCO
Business
Source
Complete and
ABI/INFORM
Pro Quest
Variants of “Blog”or
“Wiki”,“Social
Bookmarking”or
“Social Computing”,
“Facebook”or
“YouTube”
Information
systems (IS)
Inagaki et al.
(2012)
2006-2010 181
articles
International
journals
EBSCO, Pro
Quest and
Google
Scholar
Web 2.0, Learning and
E-Learning
Education
Zyl (2009) n/a n/a Journal articles,
white
papers, popular
media and books
n/a n/a Electronic
social
networking in
organizations
Source: Altamimi (2013)
Table I.
Summary of social
software literature
reviews
132
AJIM
69,2
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