Crianza, Dietas y Diseño Experimental

With the emergence of online social networks, a new debate started about the meaning and value of privacy. According to some researchers, privacy has been undermined by online social networks, even some of them claim that it no longer exist.5 The notion of privacy is hard to define particularly for online social networks where users voluntarily disclose personal information as part of their social activity. Due to the exponential growth of online social networks, sharing personal content on the web has gained ac- ceptance and become a routine behavior for millions of the users. The level and depth of personal information disclosure has raised serious concerns about privacy. The mi- gration from physical to digital environments has changed the traditional approach to privacy altogether. Current definitions of privacy focus on privacy as process or capabil- ity for social situations rather than privacy being an attribute attached to the particular information. In this section, we present various definitions of information privacy from the online social network perspective. According to Kang [112], the information pri- vacy is an individual’s claim to control the terms under which personal information is acquired, disclosed or used. Palen et al. [113] view information privacy as a state

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Do Social Networks Brings the End of Privacy? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do- social-networks-bring/

of social withdrawal which is quite undesirable in today’s information society. More privacy is not necessarily better because it leads to isolation which is not the desirable state. In fact, information privacy is a delicate act of balancing between disclosure and concealment that allows users to interact with one another socially. The recent focus of privacy research shifted towards the struggle to control one’s own self-disclosure. The authors also suggest three boundaries of information privacy with which OSNs users are struggling.

Disclosure Boundary Managing the tension between what is private and what is

public

Identity Boundary Managing self-presentation with specific audience

Temporal Boundary Managing past action with future expectations

The users have a scope in mind when they upload personal information in online so- cial networks. This scope is defined by disclosure, identity, and temporal boundaries. The privacy is breached when information is moved beyond its intended scope either accidentally or maliciously. Simply a breach can occur when information is shared with a party for whom it was not intended, it can also happen when information is abused for a different purpose than was intended, or when information is accessed after its intended lifetime. The detailed discussion of these boundaries is presented in the section on shifting privacy research paradigm for online social networks. Anwar [114] puts forward relatively similar definition for information privacy, where author expands on widely perceived notion of privacy as control over personal information. According to him, information privacy boils down to control over three aspects of personal in- formation: flow, boundary, and persistence. The flow is defined as the act of sharing information with multiple stakeholders. The boundary of information is defined as the scope or realm within which shared information to be used. Persistence of information is defined as the period of time shared information is available to or usable by the

stakeholders with whom it is shared. The flow of information is a unique characteristic of Anwer’s definition and boundary and persistence of information are concerned for privacy only when the flow of information takes places.

Gurses et al. [115] view privacy in online social networks from a different perspec- tive. According to the author’s negotiation of boundaries address only one type of the privacy problems in online social networks, whereas the researchers highlight two other type of privacy problems which fall out of the scope of boundary regulation. Contem- porary online social networks raise three types of privacy problem which are described as follows:

Surveillance Privacy: This problem arises when the personal information and social

interactions of OSN users are leveraged by government and service providers.

Social Privacy: This problem emerges through the necessary renegotiation of bound-

aries as social interactions get mediated by OSN services.

Institutional Privacy: This problem is related to users losing control and oversight

over the collection and processing of their information in OSNs.

The surveillance and institutional privacy problems are out of the scope of any technical solutions and require a strict legal framework which ensures data protection of the OSNs users. The main focus of this research is social privacy problem which relates to the concerns that users raise and harm that they experience when technologically mediated communication disrupt social boundaries. The authors stress on enabling appropriate privacy practices to respect identity, disclosure, and temporal boundaries suggested by Palen et al [113]. A comprehensive characterization of social web privacy from multidisciplinary and multi-party perspectives is proposed by Netter et al. [116]. The authors break the concept into a set of characteristics that are subsequently used to conduct privacy impact analysis. The detail description of each characteristic is given below:

Audience Segregation This characteristic describes that each individual performs multiple and possibly conflicting roles in everyday life and it needs to segregate the audience for each role, in a way that people from one audience cannot witness a role performance that is intended for another audience. In current online social networks almost all friends are treated equally, As a result, privacy is threatened because a large audience might have access to personal information.

Data Sovereignty It describes to what extent an individual is able to control the

processing of its personal data. In the case of online social networks, personal data is available in a structured manner. It can easily be copied, linked, aggre- gated, and transferred. The problem increases as OSNs typically lack the spatial, social, temporal boundaries of the real world which limits the flow of personal information by default.

Data Transience This characteristic revolves around the loss of personal information

over the time. In computer-mediated communication permanency of personal information poses the great challenge to privacy, whereas data transience can be considered as typical characteristic of real world communication.

Transparency It describes transparency of processing and dissemination practices.

Taking the social point of view, transparency implies an individual’s possibility to recognize contextual boundaries, which is important to contextual integrity.

Protection against profiling It describes an individual’s ability to prevent an ad-

versary from collecting, aggregating and linking personal data in order to create a digital dossier. The current landscape of online social networks poses this threat at large scale.

Privacy Awareness It describes that an individual’s awareness of privacy risk is a

Enforcement It describes an individual’s means to bring privacy preference into force.

The careful study of characteristics such as audience segregation, data sovereignty, data transience, and transparency reveals that lack of self-presentation, spatial, social, temporal, and contextual boundaries are the root causes of all privacy problems in online social networks. The definition of privacy adopted within this dissertation is inspired by work of Pfitzmann et al. [117]. The authors view privacy as a three component concept which includes data minimization, user control, and contextual integrity. The authors term this concept as a Privacy 3.0 suitable for Web 3.0. The detail description of each component is given below:

Data Minimization: Data minimization is one of the main motivations for the de-

velopment of privacy-enhancing technologies which aim to limit collection and processing of personal data by data controllers.

User Control: User control of personal information disclosure supports users in de-

ciding which personal information is released to whom and in which situation.

Contextual Integrity: Contextual integrity provides a new quality of privacy by

making the original context in which particular personal data have been gen- erated easily accessible to all entities that are aware of that particular personal data.

The authors argue that traditional approach of data minimization is not always feasible and certainly not in every situation. The user control of personal information disclosure is also not suitable for ubiquitous computing. Thus, the objective of contextual integrity is to ensure the protection of communicated information from decontextualization. The differentiation into three component is mainly driven by the constraints of the historical evolution of information technology. The data minimization is to be understood as the traditional driving concept of the field of privacy enhancing technologies (PET) in

the early 1980s. In 1990s, social interaction supporting technology achieved a level of sophistication and mutual interdependence that it required more disclosure of personal data and needed fine-grained control over disclosed data. Thus, the user control over personal data disclosure was inevitable. None of the two mentioned characteristics can be fulfilled in the field of ubiquitous computing, thus contextual integrity protects users from embarrassment by controlling disclosure of personal information out of the communicated context.

We customize this definition of privacy to suit the needs of social web users. The social web users face three major problems in their effort to manage their privacy in on- line social networks. These privacy problems are an invisible audience, interdependent privacy and context collapse. The invisible audience refers to the fact that all audience are not visible and co-present at the moment an individual user is generating digital content for online social networks. Interdependent privacy refers to the phenomenon that privacy of individual user could be out of their own control and affected by the decisions of other connected users. Context collapse refers to difficulty in disclosing personal information selectively to various life facets. Context collapse makes it diffi- cult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation

Our definition of privacy revolves around the three-component approach of Pfitz- mann et al. We address the issue of the invisible audience by minimizing disclosure to personal information of the user to first-degree contacts. This is the component in our definition termed as a disclosure minimization. The second component addresses the issue of interdependent privacy which means enhancing the ability of the users to control access to their content residing into the spaces of their friends. Finally, the issue of context collapse is resolved by preserving the contextual integrity of the users in the social web environment. These three components (disclosure minimization, user control, and contextual integrity) can be traced back to the philosophical discussion

of famous social theorists such as Goffman, Altman, and Nissenbaum. In the light of above definitions, we conclude that privacy in social web revolves around three parame- ters: self-presentation management, boundary regulation, and disclosure minimization. In the following section, we present a privacy research paradigm which is based on these features.