Facebook apps and tagging: The trade‐off between personal privacy and engaging with friends

Abstract

The use of social network sites offers many potential social benefits, but also raises privacy concerns and challenges for users. The trade-off users have to make between using sites such as Facebook to connect with their friends versus protecting their personal privacy is not well understood. Furthermore, very little behavioral research has focused on how personal privacy concerns are related to information disclosures made by one's friends. Our survey study of 116 Facebook users shows that engaging with friends through tagging activity and third-party application use is associated with higher levels of personal Facebook usage and a stronger emotional attachment to Facebook. However, users who have high levels of personal privacy concern and perceive a lack of effectiveness in Facebook's privacy policies tend to engage less frequently in tagging and app activities with friends, respectively. Our model and results explore illustrate the complexity of the trade-off between privacy concerns, engaging with friends through tagging and apps, and Facebook usage.

The effect of social network site use on the psychological well‐being of cancer patients

“…They also disseminate cancer‐related information through tagging engagement (S.S. Erfani et al, ). Tagging engagement refers to “the act of tagging oneself and one's friends in photos or posts, as well as being tagged by friends in photos or posts” (Wisniewski, Xu, Lipford, & Bello‐Ogunu, , p. 2). Facebook enables cancer patients to provide emotional support for each other by posting positive messages and liking each others' content.…”

Framing and Measuring Multi-Dimensional Interpersonal Privacy Preferences of Social Networking Site Users

“…The motivation for SNSs to protect end user privacy may be secondary to organizational goals, such as facilitating e-commerce transactions. However, our research suggests that not providing appropriate privacy mechanisms to SNS users may reduce user satisfaction, engagement with others, information sharing, SNS use, and consumer loyalty to a particular SNS (Wang, Xu, & Grossklags, 2011;Wisniewski et al, 2015a;Wisniewski et al, 2015b). We hope that future research can build on our work to confirm the potential individual benefits and business-value associated with understanding and supporting SNS users' unique privacy preferences.…”

“…While such "optout" privacy policies may facilitate more sharing, they also have the potential of disengaging SNS users who desire higher levels of privacy (Baumer et al, 2013;Wang, Wisniewski, Xu, & Grossklags, 2014;Wisniewski, Xu, & Chen, 2014b;Wisniewski et al, 2015b). Possibly because SNSs discouraged it or from external social pressures, SNS users often felt uncomfortable enacting interpersonal boundaries even when it was appropriate to do so.…”

Lack of the normative lens: Discussions on research on micro‐targeted ads explanation of Facebook

“…Moreover, individuals and individual household can be effectively singled out using simple manipulations within the system's setting (Faizullabhoy & Korolova, 2018). For these studies setting privacy as their normative pursuit, the question remains regarding the conflict of achieving privacy and other normative goals, because Facebook users are not only or even mainly interested in privacy (Wisniewski, Xu, Lipford, & Bello-Ogunu, 2015).…”