C4ps

Abstract

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.