Keeping Up Appearances: Audience Segregation in Social Network Sites

In the last couple of years research has shown that most social network sites pose serious privacy and security risks for individual users. Based on the existing analyses of privacy and security risks in social network sites, we have clustered these risks in two large categories. One category revolves around the notion of “audience segregation”, which is the partitioning of different audiences and the compartmentalisation of social spheres. Since audience segregation is an important tool in everyday interactions between people in the real world, we argue that social network sites ought to include this mechanism as well. In this article we discuss the necessity of audience segregation in view of privacy and security in social network sites and its lack in current social network sites. We then present a privacy-preserving social network site, called Clique that is being developed to consistently provide audience segregation to users.

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