The ever increasing popularity of Online Social Networks has left a wealth of personal data on the web, accessible for broad and automatic retrieval. Protection from undesired recipients and harvesting by crawlers is implemented by access control, manually configured by the user in his privacy settings. Privacy unfriendly default settings and the user unfriendly privacy setting interfaces cause an unnoticed over-sharing. We propose C4PS -Colors for Privacy Settings, a concept for future privacy setting interfaces. We developed a mockup for privacy settings in Facebook as a proof of concept, applying color coding for different privacy visibilities, providing easy access to the privacy settings, and generally following common, well known practices. We evaluated this mockup in a lab study and show in the results that the new approach increases the usability significantly. Based on the results we provide a Firefox plug-in implementing C4PS for the new Facebook interface.

The ever increasing popularity of Facebook and other Online Social Networks has left a wealth of personal as well as private data on the web, aggregated and readily accessible for broad and automatic retrieval. Protection from both undesired recipients and harvesting by crawlers is implemented by access control, manually configured by the user and owner of the data. Several studies demonstrate that default settings cause an unnoticed over-sharing and that users have trouble understanding and configuring adequate privacy settings. We developed an improved interface for privacy settings in Facebook by mainly applying color coding for different groups, providing easy access to the privacy settings, and applying the principle of common practices. Using a lab study, we show that the new approach increases the usability significantly.

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