Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook

By F. Stutzman, Ralph Gross, Alessandro Acquisti. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, 2013

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, social network sites have experienced dramatic growth in popularity, reaching most demographics and providing new opportunities for interaction and socialization. Through this growth, users have been challenged to manage novel privacy concerns and balance nuanced trade-offs between disclosing and withholding personal information. To date, however, no study has documented how privacy and disclosure evolved on social network sites over an extended period of time. In this manuscript we use profile data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005---the early days of the network---and 2011. Our analysis highlights three contrasting trends. First, over time Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected profiles in the same network. However, and second, changes implemented by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or in some cases inverted that trend. Third, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed privately to other connected profiles actually increased over time---and because of that, so did disclosures to ``silent listeners'' on the network: Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. These findings highlight the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b9746293bdd6e739af977bddb313fdf8cedcaf1

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Citations in the corpus

The Willingness to Sell Personal Data (2018, neutral): “4 Stutzman, Gross, and Acquisti (2013) study whether Facebook users changed their privacy and disclosure behavior between 2005 and 2011.”
Understanding OSN-based facial disclosure against face authentication systems (2014, background): “As previously explained, most of face authentication products [10, 8, 34, 23, 24, 35] provide very limited choices on security level.”
Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media (2014, background): “Facebook’s privacy settings, for example, have changed significantly over the last decade (Stutzman et al., 2013), and many users are not confident that they can configure their settings to obtain a desired level of privacy (boyd and Hargittai, 2010).”
Students’ Wellbeing, Fear of Missing out, and Social Media Engagement for Leisure in Higher Education Learning Environments (2016, neutral): “…users to share access to diverse forms of content, such as profile information, status updates, or private information (Steinfield et al. 2013; Stutzman et al. 2012); to communicate with other people about products and the companies that provide them (Kietzmann et al. 2011; Mangold and Faulds…”
Secrets and Likes: The Drive for Privacy and the Difficulty of Achieving It in the Digital Age (2020, background): “Although Facebook users on the Carnegies Mellon University’s network did become less likely to share their personal information with strangers between 2005 and 2009, changes in the Facebook interface in late 2009 and early 2010, affecting the visibility of certain profile fields, abruptly reversed t”
Nudges for Privacy and Security (2017, methodology): “Similarly, using data from a six-year longitudinal study of 5,076 Facebook users, Stutzman et al. [2013] document changes in Facebook interface be-tween 2009 and 2010 that may have nudged users toward more disclosure.”