Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online Social Networking Community

Abstract

Online social networking communities such as Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. These sites have changed how many people develop and maintain relationships through posting and sharing personal information. The amount and depth of these personal disclosures have raised concerns regarding online privacy. We expand upon previous research on users' under-utilization of available privacy options by examining users' current strategies for maintaining their privacy, and where those strategies fail, on the online social network site Facebook. Our results demonstrate the need for mechanisms that provide awareness of the privacy impact of users' daily interactions.

Context and Privacy Concerns in Friend Request Decisions

“…In summary, our qualitative results show that offline connection, mutual friends, commonalities in city, college, or Facebook group, and interesting posts are major contextual factors that influence decisions on friend requests, especially those from unknown requesters. These results are in line with previous studies showing that offline contact (Strater & Lipford, 2008), mutual friends (Chen et al, 2009), interesting content (Ben Sassi et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2009;Guy et al, 2011), and common location history (Chen et al, 2009) significantly increase friend request acceptance. We thus refine H5-H9 to:…”

“…In friend request decisions, users consider the characteristics of the requestors in deciding whether or not to accept the requestors into their online social networks. For example, users are more likely to accept known requestors (Chen, Geyer, Dugan, Muller, & Guy, 2009), or those with whom they have minimal offline interaction (Strater & Lipford, 2008). When unknown persons send friend requests, users rely on common friends, interesting content (for instance, photos, lists, interests, and so on) and similarity of location (Ben Sassi, Mellouli, & Ben Yahia, 2017;Chen et al, 2009;Guy, Ur, Ronen, Perer, & Jacovi, 2011), as well as the social clues (Wisniewski et al, 2012).…”

Privacy Concerns vs. User Behavior in Community Question Answering

“…Our work also shows the importance of user-friendly and more practical design of privacy controls, as we find that increased engagement is associated with the use of privacy controls. For example, the lack of appropriate visual feedback has been identified as one of the reasons of the underutilization of privacy settings [33]. A better interface for setting privacy controls in the CQA platforms can impact users' understanding of privacy settings and thus their success in exercising privacy controls.…”

Privacy and security in online social networks: A survey

“…Lack of appropriate visual feedback has been identified as one of the reasons for confusing and time consuming privacy settings [Strater and Lipford, 2008]. View-centric privacy solutions are built on the intuition that a better interface for setting privacy controls can impact users' understanding of privacy settings and thus their success in correctly exercising privacy controls.…”