Analyzing facebook privacy settings

Abstract

The sharing of personal data has emerged as a popular activity over online social networking sites like Facebook. As a result, the issue of online social network privacy has received significant attention in both the research literature and the mainstream media. Our overarching goal is to improve defaults and provide better tools for managing privacy, but we are limited by the fact that the full extent of the privacy problem remains unknown; there is little quantification of the incidence of incorrect privacy settings or the difficulty users face when managing their privacy.In this paper, we focus on measuring the disparity between the desired and actual privacy settings, quantifying the magnitude of the problem of managing privacy. We deploy a survey, implemented as a Facebook application, to 200 Facebook users recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find that 36% of content remains shared with the default privacy settings. We also find that, overall, privacy settings match users' expectations only 37% of the time, and when incorrect, almost always expose content to more users than expected. Finally, we explore how our results have potential to assist users in selecting appropriate privacy settings by examining the user-created friend lists. We find that these have significant correlation with the social network, suggesting that information from the social network may be helpful in implementing new tools for managing privacy.

A Review of Gaps between Usability and Security/Privacy

“…Similar results have also been presented by Yabing and Krishna [49] showing that only 37% of the times, privacy settings match users' expectations. And almost always when it does not match, it leads to revealing information to someone it was not supposed to.…”

Evolving the Ecosystem of Personal Behavioral Data

“…A broad and growing literature makes it clear that designing privacy and sharing controls is incredibly difficult, and in many cases people do not even understand what privacy settings mean (Kelley et al, 2012;Liu, Gummadi, Krishnamurthy, & Mislove, 2011). This is far from a solved problem.…”

Issues and Challenges of Cyber Security for Social Networking Sites (Facebook)

“…Marcum et al [23] suggested that users may not understand the risks associated with sharing personal information or the potentiality to use this information to predict highly confidential data like social security numbers.…”