Information revelation and privacy in online social networks

Participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as Friendster, Tribe, or the Facebook allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with vast networks of friends - and, often, unknown numbers of strangers. In this paper we study patterns of information revelation in online social networks and their privacy implications. We analyze the online behavior of more than 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University students who have joined a popular social networking site catered to colleges. We evaluate the amount of information they disclose and study their usage of the site's privacy settings. We highlight potential attacks on various aspects of their privacy, and we show that only a minimal percentage of users changes the highly permeable privacy preferences.

[1]  Hugo Liu.  InterestMap : Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations , 2004 .

[2]  Yajie Tian,et al.  Handbook of face recognition , 2003 .

[3]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Privacy in electronic commerce and the economics of immediate gratification , 2004, EC '04.

[4]  Sharon L. Milgram,et al.  The Small World Problem , 1967 .

[5]  S. Milgram,et al.  The Individual In A Social World: Essays and Experiments , 1992 .

[6]  Lior Jacob Strahilevitz,et al.  A Social Networks Theory of Privacy , 2004 .

[7]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  Triggers and barriers to customizing software , 1991, CHI.

[8]  Latanya Sweeney,et al.  k-Anonymity: A Model for Protecting Privacy , 2002, Int. J. Uncertain. Fuzziness Knowl. Based Syst..

[9]  Holly Holland,et al.  Where Everybody Knows Your Name , 2001 .

[10]  Robert S. Gerstein.  Intimacy and Privacy , 1978, Ethics.

[11]  Pierangela Samarati,et al.  Protecting privacy when disclosing information: k-anonymity and its enforcement through generalization and suppression , 1998 .

[12]  Mark S. Granovetter.  T H E S T R E N G T H O F WEAK TIES: A NETWORK THEORY REVISITED , 1983 .

[13]  P. Jonathon Phillips,et al.  Empirical Evaluation Methods in Computer Vision , 2002 .

[14]  D. Boyd.  Reflections on Friendster, Trust and Intimacy , 2003 .

[15]  Judith Donath,et al.  Public Displays of Connection , 2004 .

[16]  William L. Simon,et al.  The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security , 2001 .

[17]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Friendster and publicly articulated social networking , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[18]  C. W. Morris.  Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism , 1995 .

[19]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age , 2003 .

[20]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[21]  Patrick J. Flynn,et al.  Overview of the face recognition grand challenge , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).