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.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a well-established security and privacy concept in enterprise environments: Enterprise DLP tools scan outgoing messages and stop unintended information flows. It may catch malicious insiders, but the main use case is avoiding data leaks due to human errors. Good DLP tools prevent careless employees from doing something they would probably regret if made aware of. Individuals using online social networks are in a very similar situation: Often they share the wrong information with the wrong people, unaware of the risks and often even unaware of the technical meaning of what they are doing. Personal DLP, introduced in this paper, extends the notion of DLP to individual users. It makes the individual users aware of risks and mistakes, and it does so based on rules explicitly set by each user, and rules derived from that users' past behavior and individual settings. Personal DLP raises awareness by explaining the risks, but the final decision is always with the user.
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