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With the advent of Web 2.0, numerous social software applications allow people to publish and share information on the Internet. Two of these types of applications -collaborative workspaces and social network sites -have a number of features in common, which are explored to provide a basis for comparative analysis. This basis is extended with a suitable definition of privacy, a sociological perspective and an applicable adversary model in order to facilitate an investigation of similarities and differences with regard to privacy threats. Practical examples are derived from the use of Wikipedia and Facebook. Analysis suggests that a combination of technical, legal, and normative solutions should be considered to counter privacy issues. A number of potential solutions that may mitigate these issues are proposed.

While interacting with others on the internet, users share a lot of personal data with a potentially large but "invisible" audience. An important issue is maintaining control over personal data and therefore, in the first place, users need to be aware to whom they are disclosing which data. Based on the cues-filtered-out theory we introduce a new feature to support the privacy-awareness of forum users and tested it with 313 users. The results of our empirical study show that the presentation of privacy-related context cues indeed increases forum users' privacy-awareness. This is an important precondition for users' willingness to modify privacy settings or to use privacy-enhancing technologies.

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