Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?

By D. boyd, Eszter Hargittai. First Monday, 2010

591 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook's changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy. We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook's approach to privacy was hotly contested. We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings. In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online. We discuss the possible reasons for our findings and their implications.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/823a8451fc5f06f17cc36629356a76c756fefef5

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Citations in the corpus

Why Do People Use Facebook? (2011, background): “Users can add basic facts about themselves , such as home town, add contact information, personal interests, job information and a descriptive photograph (Boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Facebook, 2011).”
What drives successful social networking services? A comparative analysis of user acceptance of Facebook and Twitter (2014, unknown): “…the biggest SNS, boasting more than 900 million users (Goldman, 2012 Researchers highlight the following distinguishable features of Facebook (Boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Hoadley, Xu, Lee, & Rosson, 2010; Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010; Miller & Jensen, 2007; Parris, Abdesslem, & Henderson,…”
Social research 2.0: virtual snowball sampling method using Facebook (2012, background): “, 2007; Bigge, 2006) or on ethical issues concerning with the reward of private information on the Internet (Acquisti and Gross, 2006; Boyd and Ellison, 2008; Boyd, 2008; Boyd and Hargittai, 2010).”
Is it a tool suitable for learning? A critical review of the literature on Facebook as a technology-enhanced learning environment (2013, background): “…2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 1 2010; Zwier, Araujo, Boukes, & Willemsen, 2011) and privacy concerns (boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Waters & Ackerman, 2011), which recently resulted in a systematic review of the literature (Wilson, Gosling, & Graham,…”
The 'Privacy Paradox' in the Social Web: The Impact of Privacy Concerns, Individual Characteristics, and the Perceived Social Relevance on Different Forms of Self-Disclosure1 (2014, background): “…research has shown that users are indeed concerned about their privacy within the Social Web, but do not apply these concerns to their usage behavior correspondingly (e.g. Acquisti & Gross, 2006; Boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Debatin et al., 2009; Tufekci, 2008; Yao et al., 2007; Youn & Hall, 2008).”
Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook (2013, background): “Numerous studies documented both an increase in privacy awareness and privacy-seeking behaviors within Facebook by students [9, 44, 46, 59] and the contextual application of privacy settings in relation to perceived harms [15, 55].”
Digital Literacy and Privacy Behavior Online (2013, background): “Recently, the hotly contested privacy settings on social networking sites, such as Facebook, focused serious scholarly attention on personalized data control (e.g., boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Debatin, Lovejoy, Horn, & Hughes, 2009; Fogel & Nehmad, 2009).”
"I regretted the minute I pressed share": a qualitative study of regrets on Facebook (2011, background): “More recent studies seem to suggest that users are becoming more privacy concerned and more likely to change their privacy settings [33, 11].”
Privacy attitudes and privacy behaviour: A review of current research on the privacy paradox phenomenon (2017, unknown): “…strategies, such as using pseudonyms and giving false information (Miltgen and Peyrat-Guillard, 2014), restricting access to their proﬁles and adjusting their privacy settings (boyd and Hargittai, 2010), limiting friendship requests, and deleting tags and photos (Young and Quan-Haase, 2013).”
Engineering Information Disclosure: Norm Shaping Designs (2016, background): “A great deal of existing research on privacy in the context of social media platforms such as Facebook relies on self-reports (e.g, [11, 28, 29]).”
Older and Wiser? Facebook Use, Privacy Concern, and Privacy Protection in the Life Stages of Emerging, Young, and Middle Adulthood (2015, background): “First, respondents were asked to indicate how often they adapted their privacy settings during the previous year on a scale ranging from “never” to “4 times or more” (boyd & Hargittai, 2010).”
Facebook and privacy: it's complicated (2012, background): “Despite significant changes in the demographics of Facebook users, most of the empirical research on Facebook users’ privacy concerns has been limited to undergraduates or teenagers [1, 4, 7, 14, 17, 21, 28, 30].”
We're in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services (2011, background): “For example, survey results concerning privacy on Facebook highlight that youth do care about privacy and show how modifications to privacy settings increased over a year during which privacy policies were debated heatedly [8].”