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10 Years of Facebook Privacy Concerns
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10 Years of Facebook Privacy Concerns
Amer Abu Ali, Nassim Dehouche, Amer Al Qaise
Northern Borders University, College of Computing & Information Technology
Rafha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Abstract
1
Introduction
Throughout the past decade, social networks have connected the world in
ways previously unknown, profoundly altering the way we communicate.
Spurred by their ease of use and low cost of usage, the numbers of users
of websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been continuously growing. Nowadays, these social media have become so prominent
that many users cannot go a day without using them to share information
(images, videos and posts) with each other [17]). With more than 1.3 billion users, Facebook has become the world’s largest social networking site.
In their recent editorial for the 10 years of Facebook special issue of the
journal New Media and Society, Lincoln and Robards rightfully remark that
“Facebook has made its mark on contemporary society as a space for social, cultural and political interactions” [25]. In december 2014, the social
network has been declared the most popular website in the world by the SimilarWeb Analytics Tool and the second most popular website in the world
in the Alexa Top 500 Global Sites ranking. The number of Facebook active
users has been multiplied by a factor 1300, over the last 10 years, as can be
seen on Figure 1 presenting the number of Facebook monthly active users
(Source: Statista.com).
This rapid growth in popularity for Facebook has simultaneously engendered
increasing public concerns and an important scholarly interest around the
privacy of its users. Figure 2. Shows the evolution of the cumulative number
of scholarly articles related to privacy on Facebook, that have been published
over the last decade and are indexed by google Scholar. From Gross and
Acquisti early work, dating back to less than a year after the social network
1
Figure 1: Number of active users of Facebook (in millions) over the years
was launched, when it was still called The Facebook and catered to college
students [1], to the more recent, and gloomy, work of Fox and Moreland [?],
year 2015 marks the tenth year of scholarly work surrounding privacy on
Facebook.
2
Facebook Privacy Concerns in the Press
Over the last decade, news, stories and editorials related to Facebook privacy regularly appeared on the headlines of newspapers and other general
information media. Although, outside the scope of the present review, these
events have had a large impact in the public debate, and have molded the
perception of Facebook in the public opinion. The most recent public debate
surrounding privacy on Facebook, followed the 2011 Federal Trade Commission ruling against Facebook and decision to monitor the company for the
next 20 years, after serious violations, which included allowing other companies to access users’ personal information – even after they deleted their
account [16]. More minor debates regularly emerge, such as Facebook usage
being linked to an increase in divorces [27], depression[23], or causing job
terminations [26] and imprisonments [24]. Interested readers are referred to
the book and [13] for a more extensive review of this type of news items.
2
Figure 2: Cumulative number of scholarly articles concerning privacy on
Facebook over the years
3
Facebook Privacy Concerns in Scholarly Works
We present scholarly works expressing or analyzing concerns about privacy
on Facebook generally study a specific type of cause and effect relationship,
and, on this basis, can be classified into three main categories:
• How Facebook usage relates to privacy.
• How users’ levels of information relates to their attitude towards privacy.
• The Real world consequences of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy.
3.1
Facebook Usage and Privacy
Over 50% of Facebook members are considered highly-active users. They log
on to their account every day and spend over 700 billion minutes per month
on the social networking site [12]. The results of a survey by Young and
Haase [4] showed that (99%) of Facebook users posted their actual names in
the profile. They found that a large percentage of respondents noted their
school name (97%), e-mail address (83%), birth date (92%), the current city
or town in which they live (80%), and almost all respondents reported posting
an image of themselves (98%) and photos of their friends (96%).
3
Users tend to share various posts on Facebook. Wang et al. [15] used Latent
Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify topics from more than half a million
Facebook status updates, and determine which topics are more likely to receive feedback, such as likes and comments. They found that women tend
to share more personal topics (e.g., family matters), while men discuss more
public ones (e.g., politics and sports). Generally, women receive more feedback than men, but ”male” topics (those more often posted by men) receive
more feedback, especially when posted by women.
Lampe et al [?], through a study of 614 staff members at a large university,
have showed how social capital, network characteristics, and type of usage
are related to how useful individuals find Facebook to be for informational
purposes and their propensity to seek different types of information on the
site. The authors identified a number of demographic and usage behavior
differences between those who choose to engage in information-seeking behaviors on Facebook and those who do not.
Baumer et al. [20] presented results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the
service. Results showed a lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and
non-use. Indeed, various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative
analysis revealed numerous complex and interrelated motivations including:
privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures.
In a similar study, Stieger et al. [21] questioned a sample of 310 users who
decided to leave Facebook. Privacy appeared to be, by far, their main selfstated reason for discontinuining their membership (48%), general dissatisfaction with Facebook (14%), negative aspects regarding Facebook friends
(13%) and the feeling of getting addicted to Facebook (6%), being the other
self-stated reasons for commiting what the authors call “Virtual Identity
Suicide”. The PEW research group Internet reports that in 2011, 63% of
Facebook users had removed someone from their friend network [17] , an
increase compared to the 56% of users who declared having ”unfriended”
someone in 2009. The same survey found deleting and untagging posts to be
common among all user demographics.
In the work of Fox and Moreland, users’ lack of privacy and control on
the social networking site is notably identified among major psychological
stressors related to Facebook usage [28].
4
3.2
Awareness of Facebook Policies and Settings
Aligning his software with his conviction that ”privacy is no longer a social
norm” [11], founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has clearly challenged our
society’s standards for privacy. By default, Facebook is designed to share
the majority of its users information with “everyone,” i.e. all members of
the site. Although Facebook Privacy settings can be adjusted , the social
network thus encourages users to keep these default privacy settings instead
of having them at a stricter level. However, many users do not know how
to go about accessing or modifying these settings or are not well-informed
enough about their importance.
A study by Egelman et al. [10] showed how users have difficulty configuring
Facebook privacy settings to satisfy task requirements in a laboratory configuration, and Acquisti and Gross [2] showed that only a small number of
Facebook users changed their default privacy settings.
Additionally, the task of protecting users’ privacy is made more difficult by
their possible lack of awareness on the “nuts and bolts” of the tracking and
advertising industry. Although this information is made public by Facebook
and even after numerous press reports and widespread disclosure of leakages
on the Web and on popular online social networks, many users appear not to
be fully aware of the fact that their personal information may be collected,
aggregated and linked with ambient information for a variety of purposes
[22].
Liu et al. [14] focused on measuring the disparity between the desired and
actual privacy settings, quantifying the magnitude of the problem of managing privacy. They deploy a survey, implemented as a Facebook application,
to 200 Facebook users recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The authors
found that 36% of content remains shared with the default privacy settings
and overall, privacy settings match users’ expectations only 37% of the time,
and when incorrect, almost always expose content to more users than expected.
In front of the accumulation of all these elements, Facebook has taken steps,
in november 2014, to educate users on its policies and simplified them, shortening the description of its policy regarding users data by two-thirds [?].
However these changes do not affect the quantity of data that the social
network collects about its users.
When sufficiently informed, Facebook users generally care about their privacy
and will take some steps to protect it, although preferences may vary over
populations and over time.
Staddon et al. [?] described their survey results from a representative
sample of 1,075 U.S. social network users who use Facebook as their primary
5
network. Their results showed a strong association between low engagement
and privacy concern. They manually categorized the privacy concerns finding that many are nonspecific and not associated with negative personal
experiences. Boyd and Hargittai [7] provided a longitudinal study of privacy
practices and attitudes of teenagers. They found significant behavioral evidence of privacy concern in this age group, in contrast to popular opinion,
and found that engaged users are more likely to change privacy settings.
In hindsight, the results of this study suggest that teenagers have become
more concerned with privacy in social network over the years, when compared to those of earlier studies. In 2005, Gross and Acquisti [1] investigated
students’ awareness of privacy threats and the available privacy protection
features in Facebook. They found that the majority of the students despite
being aware of the possible threats in online environments feel comfortable
with it. Moreover, although aware of the availability of privacy protection
measures in Facebook, they did not take any initiative to protect their personal information.
Young adults may be concerned about social aspects of privacy [9] or
location privacy [6]. Some users may change their privacy settings to increase
secrecy; other actions include untagging photos, de-friending people, and
deleting comments, though these actions are not frequently or consistently
deployed [3]. Krasnova et al [5] held focus groups with university students in
Berlin about their concerns with Facebook use. The most important concern
was unwanted audiences viewing shared content.
Bauer et al [19] investigated empirically how privacy preferences about
the audience and emphasis of Facebook posts change over time. They found
that participants did not want content to fade away wholesale with age; the
audience participants wanted to be able to access posts remained relatively
constant over time. Surprisingly, they observed few concerns about privacy
or self-presentation for older posts.
3.3
Consequences in the Real World
Oltmann [8] reviewed the predominant legal conception of privacy in the U.S.
and apply it to privacy on Facebook. The analysis demonstrated, the privacy
trends associated with Facebook are likely to have broader ramifications in
the offline world, including a reduction in overall privacy. Oltmann focused
on the United States, as one of the few developed nations that does not have
cross-sector privacy laws.
Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd [29] proposed a theory of networked
privacy. Drawing on in-depth research with teens from across the United
States, Marwick and boyd argue that young people are having to rethink how
6
they conceptualize privacy, moving debates from traditional individualistic
approaches to ones that compliment the networked nature of social media.
Wang et al. (2011) investigated regrets associated with users’ posts on a
popular social networking site. Their findings were based on a series of interviews, user diaries, and online surveys involving 569 American Facebook
users. Their regrets revolved around sensitive topics, content with strong
sentiment, lies, and secrets. Their research revealed several possible causes
of why users make posts that they later regret: (1) they want to be perceived
in favorable ways, (2) they do not think about their reason for posting or the
consequences of their posts, (3) they misjudge the culture and norms within
their social circles, (4) they are in a “hot” state of high emotion when posting, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, (5) their postings are seen by
an unintended audience, (6) they do not foresee how their posts could be perceived by people within their intended audience, and (7) they misunderstand
or misuse the Facebook platform. Wang et al. (2011) discussed methodological considerations in studying negative experiences associated with social
networking posts, as well as ways of helping users of social networking sites
avoid such regrets.
Dey et al. [?] developed crawling and data mining methodologies to
discover and profile most of the students in a targeted high school. The
methodology was notably able to find most of the students, and for each one
of them to infer a profile that includes significantly more information than is
available in a registered minor’s public profile. Such profiles can be used for
many nefarious purposes, including reselling them to data brokers, large-scale
automated spear-phishing attacks, as well as physical safety attacks such as
stalking, kidnapping and arranging meetings for sexual abuse.
In their paper Effendy et al. (2012) revisited the problem of the link
privacy attack in online social networks. They tried to reduce the effect of
the link privacy attack, they presented several practical mitigation strategies
–non-uniform user privacy settings, approximation of the node degree information and a non-constant cost model for the attack. They claimed that all
the strategies are able to mitigate the privacy link attack by either reducing
the effectiveness of the attack or by making it more expensive to mount.
4
Conclusion
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