Sharing Ephemeral Information in Online Social Networks: Privacy Perceptions and Behaviours

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a study where the online Facebook practices of a sample of users (n=103) was analysed over a period of two years, via the scraping of data in Facebook and the collection of questionnaire data. The data allows for a contrast between implicit and explicit attitudes regarding Facebook and online sharing. Our analysis reveals that while overall privacy concerns are not reflected in posting behaviour, awareness and familiarity with privacy controls is. This is supported by contrasting users' attitudes regarding day-today sharing against actual behaviour on Facebook. We theorise that there exists a failure in translating users' privacy needs into a social-technical environment such as social networking sites. This work demonstrates how aspects such as demographics and usage influence and shape users' behaviour and practices towards privacy. We therefore argue that the factorization of these aspects may augment the translation of users' privacy needs and improve the design of privacy sensitive mechanisms for day-to-day information sharing.

An Ecological Approach to Privacy: “Doing” Online Privacy at Midlife

“…When considering that privacy is negotiated and accomplished, it is perhaps somewhat surprising to see that while many individuals cite privacy as an ongoing concern with social media use, online actions, disclosures, or a willingness to share data often do not correspond to the level of concern for privacy violations (Acquisti & Gross, 2006;Fogel & Nehmad, 2009;Debatin et al, 2009;Tufekci, 2008;Zafeiropoulou et al, 2013); there are apparent disconnects between users' stated preferences and actual behaviors (Ahern et al, 2007;Reynolds et al, 2011;Stutzman, Capra, & Thompson, 2011 2 ).…”

“…Studies have noted an increase in the proportion of individuals enacting privacy controls (Madden, 2012;Pew Internet, 2009), the practice of restricting status updates to select others (Vitak & Ellison, 2013), and the creation of multiple profiles to maintain social boundaries (Stutzman & Hartzog, 2012); findings of these studies may be interpreted as signals that the privacy paradox is shrinking. Other studies have found, however, that the relevance of the paradox continues: users underestimate the size of their network resulting in continued differences between privacy concerns and privacy protecting behaviors with respect to ephemeral information such as status updates (Reynolds, Venkatanathan, Gonçalves, & Kostakos, 2011) and users permit broad access to certain types of information, such as location data and photos, despite concerns that it might result in privacy violations (Taddicken, 2014;Zafeiropoulou et al, 2013). Moreover, the behaviors of those highly concerned about privacy exhibit significantly different privacy protecting behaviors in their social network site use than average users (Staddon, Acquisti, & LeFevre, 2013).…”

Investigating the Use of a Simulator to Support Users in Anticipating Impact of Privacy Settings in Facebook

“…The issues vary from the difficulties that users have in representing the level of privacy desired [17] or understanding how the settings affect the availability of information [13] to legal aspects of privacy policies [10] or the generation of new information about users by crossing public information available about them [14,22]. Since our goal is to analyze the challenge of anticipating impacts of configuration settings, in this section we will focus on the articles related to the difficulties users have in setting privacy and understanding their effects.…”

“…One of the issues that researchers have focused on is privacy, which has been investigated under different perspectives, such as analyzing users' concern with privacy issues [7,13] and which aspects (e.g. gender or age) impact privacy setting [17,21] or even inferring new information about users based on public information [14,22].…”

From School Food to Skate Parks in a Few Clicks: Using Public Displays to Bootstrap Civic Engagement of the Young

“…A second limitation of our work is that the Facebook component of Ubinion saw very little meaningful postings from users. The few comments received via Facebook were of ephemeral nature [31] and aimed to publicize one's self and friends by identifying people in photographs and thereby sharing the photographs in one's own "stream" on Facebook. The lack of active contributing users is akin to lurking, a behavior that was not unexpected as it is commonly observed in online communities [32,33].…”