Various surveys have been conducted on privacy concerns of OSN users, One of the first qualitative studies on privacy issues in online social networks was conducted at Carnegie Mellon University which analyzed 4,000 profiles of CMU students. As per result of this research user of online social networks disclose the huge amount of personal information in their profiles. Online social network users are less concerned to use site’s privacy settings to control the visibility of the profile; only 0.06% out of 4,000 users changed the default profile visibility in Facebook [66]. Most of the online social networks provide very permissive default settings and only very few users change their default settings as per the results of above-mentioned research at CMU.
A qualitative research conducted by the Office of Communication of United King- dom showed that concerns about privacy and safety are not top of mind for most of the users. This research also demonstrated that users create well-developed profiles as the basis of their online presence, and share personal information with a wide range of friends [130]. Gross [66,67] showed in a case study that most users do not change the default privacy settings as provided by the OSN. Furthermore, these users share a large amount of information on their profile. Madejski [22] shows that privacy settings for uploaded content are often incorrect, failing to match user’s expectations. Tufecki [131] investigated the relationship between user’s privacy concerns and their level of disclo- sure on an OSNs and found no relationship. Even users who expressed many privacy concerns divulged large amounts of personal information on their profiles. However, the study only asked about the relatively static fields of a profile like age, sex, gender, interests, and favorite books, rather than concerns over dynamic content (e.g., status updates, comments, etc.). He concludes in his case study that privacy-aware users are more reluctant to join social networks. However once a privacy-aware user joins he is willing to disclose a lot of information and a user’s privacy is regulated mostly through
visibility, i.e. the privacy settings of the OSN. This privacy-aware user aims to remain in control. Furthermore, users are more pre-occupied with the current visibility of their information and do not look towards future implications. It seems that users implicitly trust social network providers to handle user data in a fair and conscientious way.
Krasnova [132] held focus groups with university students to identify categories of privacy concerns about their Facebook use. The most frequent theme was concern over unwanted audiences viewing shared content, where the list of audiences mentioned included future employers, supervisors, family members, peers, and subordinates. Par- ticipants also frequently mentioned organizational threats related to the collection and use of their data by the OSNs provider and third parties. Concerns about social threats were another common theme for concerns including people purposefully posting con- tent to harm the individual and general concern over a lack of control over the actions of other users. Lampinen [133] conducted 20 semi-structured interviews in order to understand user behavior to manage heterogeneous friends network. He reported that many users fear that a boss or acquaintance might see something embarrassing that was not intended for them, and that users attempt to avoid these situations through self- censorship and using context to carefully selecting a suitable communication medium. Skeels [134] also studied the dynamics of group co-presence, but focused on SNS usage in the workplace, and found that users have trouble coping with the co-presence of coworkers and other contacts in an OSNs friends network. Many participants noted the burden associated with constantly maintaining an awareness that the two groups are present in their audience. Participants also noted the need of limit access to select content based on relationship.
Online social network users apply several strategies for mitigating their privacy concerns. Young [135] identified boundary regulation mechanisms that include deleting tags, and using direct messages to limit audiences. Stutzman [128] found that users who employed supplemental privacy preserving behaviors, like curating the posts on their
wall and collaboratively adjusting OSNs behavior among friends, were more likely to have friends-only profile. Several papers have reported that users cope with conflicting social spheres by maintaining separate profiles, limiting access to subsets of the friend network, carefully selecting a communication medium, or using separate OSNs for different audiences [136, 134]. PEW Internet reports that in 2011, 63% of Facebook users had removed someone from their friend network [72], an increase compared to the 56% of users who reported to have unfriended someone in 2009. The same survey found deleting and untagging posts to be common among all user demographics.
The prior works leave an important question unanswered how social interactions of users determine relationship strength and how relationship strength can be utilized to control information disclosure in online social networks. We conduct a user study that is focused on identifying the relationship between user interaction patterns and personal information disclosure practices. More specifically, we want to explore whether a user’s interaction with his/her friends can be used as a basis for making data access decision for that user. More specifically, we analyzed how interaction frequency and choice of interaction type reveal the relationship strength and how it plays a vital role in controlling personal information disclosure in online social networks. We explored whether a user’s interaction with his/her friends can be used as a basis for making data access decision for the user. The results were used to validate the following hypotheses about privacy and interaction patterns of the social web users.
H.1. Personal information disclosure depends on relationship strength among the users.
H.2. Relationship strength depends on the frequency of interactions among the users.
H.3. Choice of the interaction type for communication with audience depends on re- lationship strength
The majority of users has a large friends network (social graph) in online social networks consisting of more than few hundred friends, but their interaction network (interaction
graph) is found to be very small. The users prefer to share their personal information with their interaction network rather than a large friends network. Users are very selective in choosing the type of interaction in online social networks. The findings reveal that the choice of interaction type also gives an indication of the relationship strength. Additionally, the findings facilitate categorization of profile information and user interactions on the basis of sensitivity and frequency respectively.