Protecting privacy on social networks

Facebook profiles often include basic information like name and location, but also include interets, religion, political views and dating habits. This personal information is usually shared with friends, but can also be accessed by application platforms used for gaming. Photo illustration by Courtney NiskalaBy Catherine Zende
zendec@mytjnow.com

Anyone with a Facebook account knows firsthand how often privacy settings change and how difficult they can be to understand. While protecting personal information is important, it can often conflict with the many sharing features of social networking.

Heather Richter Lipford, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, studies Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and ways of maintaining privacy in a public world. 

During a recent lecture, Lipford discussed with Winthrop students her research and the importance of understanding privacy settings. An estimated three billion photos a month are shared on Facebook, and there are an estimated 95 million tweets per day. 

According to Lipford, new default Facebook privacy settings reveal more personal information than users may realize  “A lot of your information is available to the public,” Lipford said.

“Many people become disillusioned with social network sites, especially Facebook,” Lipford said. 

Understanding Privacy 

In order to protect privacy, Lipford believes it is important to define what privacy is. She provides two possible definitions of privacy. The first is the concept of contextual integrity, an idea developed by Helen Nissenbaum. According to this definition, information sharing is governed by the social norms of a given context. 

These norms are norms of appropriateness and norms of distribution. Norms of appropriateness defines what information about people is appropriate to reveal in a context. Lipford gives the example of medical information verses academic information. 

According to Lipford, giving your private medical information to your doctor is appropriate, while giving it to your school is not. Thus, what information is appropriate to provide depends on context.

Norms of distribution states that the movement or flow from information from one party to another also depends on context. Thus, individuals can choose what information is shared and where it moves. 

People often tell their friends private information that they expect to remain a secret by not flowing to another source. 

Lipford also believes that boundary regulation provides a general definition for privacy. 

Boundary regulation is a concept developed by Irwin Altman. It is an “interpersonal process” of “altering the degree of openness of the self to others.” Thus, healthy boundaries help maintain social relationships.

Technology, according to Lipford, makes understanding these privacy definitions difficult. In the online world, users must judge the context of perceived flows of information and control the boundaries of shared information. 

While Lipford provides these possibly definitions for privacy, she also recognizes how most people view privacy. “For a lot of people, it is about control,” Lipford said. According to Lipford, this means control over what information is shared and where it is shared.

Prototyping Privacy

Lipford studies HCI, which is the interaction and interface between a human and a computer .According to Lipford, it is about “trying to build better designs, better interfaces and better experiences for users.”

Part of her research has involved creating prototype interfaces to help users protect privacy. 

One Facebook-inspired experiment involved photo sharing. According to Lipford owners have a right to upload photos, but a moral obligation to respect those in the photo. 

“People really expressed this helplessness [with lack of control,” Lipford said. 

Lipford’s solution for the sharing problem involved a message system that gave users the option to send messages to the owner of the photo. Users could request that the photo be hidden from certain people, and the owner of the photo could accept or deny the request.

Lipford found that the focus group easily understood and liked the process. However, while Lipford believes most people would grant the request, a lack of social consequences can still mean some requests will be denied. 

Another interface dealt with application platforms and their access to to profile data. “Not only can it [application] access your information, it can also access the information of your friends,” Lipford said. 

In addition, people may not be aware their information is being accessed. “No one fully understood that their information was leaving Facebook and going to the serves of the app developers,” Lipford said. 

Lipford tested this issue by creating an installation experience in which users viewed 11 apps. Some apps requested context-appropriate information, some requested context-inappropriate information.

She found that most users still allowed context inappropriate information to be shared. “They based all their sharing on the name of the app,” Lipford said. Essentially, users accepted inappropriate sharing because they wanted to access the app and had no other option. 

While privacy issues remain, Lipford believes that social networking privacy will improve. “I think we’re going to see a slow evolution [in privacy], Lipford said. 

Lipford’s research is design to help social networking sites improve their systems. “My goal is to make our results widely known. Hopefully, they’ll be able to see this research and develop new privacy settings,” Lipford said.