Social Networking and Privacy

From ScribbleWiki: Analysis of Social Media

Created and maintained by Sachin Agarwal (User:Sachina)
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My ScribbleWiki page entries for references:

1. Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks [ Gross and Acquisti, Workshop-Privacy in Electronic Society 2005]
2. An evaluation of identity-sharing behavior in social network communities [ Stutzman, IDMA and IMS Code 2006 ]

Related page: Privacy (annotated by Yimeng)

Introduction

The definition of Privacy differs for every individual or group depending upon how they look at it. For some it might mean to keep their personal affairs away from public view while for some it means to be able to co-ordinate the flow of information related to their identity, though they are actually two sides of the same coin. It may also be thought of as a crude definition of anonymity or can also be seen as something related to security. The basic purpose of online social networking sites (usually) is to enable online interaction and communication among people but there might be a variety of usage patterns. Most of these social networking sites use a model of showing the user profiles to others on the site who can also visualize the network of relations with other users on the site.

Social Network Theory and privacy

The definition of privacy varies from individual to individual and also depends on the person's social network. In some situations,a person may only be willing to share his information among his close friends while in other situations, a person may be willing to share it with anonymous strangers but not with the ones who know him/her better.

The relevance of relations of different depth and strength in a person’s social network has been discussed by social network theorists in [ Granovetter, 1973 ] and [ Granovetter, 1983 ] and the importance of weak ties in the flow of information across different nodes in a network. Network theory has also been used to explore how distant nodes can get interconnected through relatively few random ties ([Milgram, 1967], [ Milgram, 1977 ] and [Watts, 2003]).

[ Strahilevitz, 2004 ] presents that the consideration of how information is expected to flow from node to node in somebody’s social network should also inform that person’s expectations for privacy of information revealed in the network. When the social network theory is applied to information revelation study in online social networks, the following differences in online and offline scenarios come into picture:

1. The offline social network ties are quite diverse in terms of how close and intimate a subject perceives a relation to be. The online social networks usually treat these connections as binary. [ Boyd, 2004 ] notes that “there is no way to determine what metric was used or what the role or weight of the relationship is. While some people are willing to indicate anyone as Friends, and others stick to a conservative definition, most users tend to list anyone who they know and do not actively dislike. This often means that people are indicated as Friends even though the user does not particularly know or trust the person”.
2. [ Donath, 2004 ] note that “the number of weak ties one can form and maintain may be able to increase substantially, because the type of communication that can be done more cheaply and easily with new technology is well suited for these ties”.
3. While an offline social network may include up to a dozen of intimate or significant ties and 1000 to 1700 “acquaintances” or “interactions” ([ Donath, 2004 ] and [ Strahilevitz, 2004 ]), an online social networks can list hundreds of direct “friends” and include hundreds of thousands of additional friends within just three degrees of separation from a subject.

All the above points show that online social networks are vaster and have weaker ties than an offline social network.

Identity-sharing behavior in social network communities

Social network communities (SNC) share the identity information over the network. The protection of an individual's identity is on high priority for a number of institutions but people actively undermine the protections through participation in SNCs. These SNCs allows a user create richly detailed personal profile where data ranges from relatively innocuous to potentially invasive. Third parties can mine a SNC for an individual's identity information. SNCs are dramatically changing how identity information is shared online. [ Stutzman, 2006 ] develops a measure of how SNCs are redefining the identity sharing behavior of a campus population. The authors have presented the results of a quantitative analysis of identity information disclosure in social network communities, as well as subject opinions regarding identity protection and information disclosure. They develop quantitative metrics on SNC participation on a college campus and investigate and comparatively analyze population attitudes about participation in SNC’s, and population attitudes about online identity sharing in general.

References

• Acquisti, A., & Gross, R., Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (PET), 2006.
• Gross, R. and Acquisti, A., Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks. in Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, (Alexandria, VA, 2005), ACM Press.
• Jagatic, T., Johnson, N., Jakobsson, M., Menczer, F. Social phishing. Communications of the ACM Forthcoming (2006).
• Stutzman, F. An evaluation of identity-sharing behavior in social network communities. In: Proceedings of the 2006 iDMAa and IMS Code Conference, Oxford, Ohio. (2006)
• M. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78:1360–1380, 1973.
• M. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological Theory, 1:201–233, 1983.
• S. Milgram. The small world problem. Psychology Today, 6:62–67, 1967.
• S. Milgram. The familiar stranger: An aspect of urban anonymity. In S. Milgram, J. Sabini, and M. Silver, editors, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1977.
• D. Watts. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. W.W.Norton & Company, 2003.
• L. J. Strahilevitz. A social networks theory of privacy. The Law School, University of Chicago, John M. Olin Law & Economics working Paper No. 230 (2D Series), December 2004.
• D. Boyd. Friendster and publicly articulated social networking. In Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004), April 24-29, Vienna, Austria, 2004.
• J. Donath and d. boyd. Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22:71–82, 2004.