In a study described in the Ottawa Citizen, University of Guelph PhD student Amy Muise, analyzed the Facebook habits of 300 undergrad students (aged 17 – 24) and made some interesting discoveries.

The first finding of interest relates to Facebook habits and personal traits. The study found that those who are inherently more self-confident are more likely to use higher privacy settings than those who are less self confident; as the article states “those who placed more importance on popularity were more inclined to share all online.”

The study also revealed some other interesting statistics:

*96% – would reveal their birthday
*84% – would reveal their home town
*81% – would reveal their relationship status
*72% – would reveal their school and program
*42% – would reveal their current city
*31% – would reveal their university residence
*24% – would reveal their phone number
*4% – would reveal their home address

The study will be published in The Journal CyberPsychology and Behavior. Thanks to Darrell Booth of Glencastle Security for alerting me to this article.

In other Facebook news, it appears that lawyers in Australia have successfully used Facebook to serve legal documents in two different and unrelated cases; one in the Australian Capital Territory (“ACT”) Supreme Court and one in the Victorian County Court.

This is in contrast to a decision made earlier this year in Queensland, Australia where a judge did not allow service by Facebook to occur.

The judge in the previous case argued that it was too easy to set up a fake profile on Facebook and that the person’s who created the “defendant’s profile” might not be the defendant at all.

In contrast, in the ACT Supreme Court case the lawyers involved, Jason Oliver and Mark McCormack, were able to convince the Court that the documents would arrive at the right place because profiles they were “serving” contained enough personal information (date of birth, common relationships) to verify that the individual of interest owned the profile.

Interestingly, according to the same article courts in that country have previously allowed judgements to be delivered by email and by text message.