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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.

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks's more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum's treatment of privacy as ''contextual integrity.'' Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites' privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users', but a user's friends' information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of ''friendship'' online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.

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