Making Privacy Personal: Profiling Social Network Users To Inform Privacy Education And Nudging

Keywords

Feature awareness; Mixture Factor Analysis; Personalization; Privacy; Social Network Sites; Understanding users

Abstract

Social Network Sites (SNSs) offer a plethora of privacy controls, but users rarely exploit all of these mechanisms, nor do they do so in the same manner. We demonstrate that SNS users instead adhere to one of a small set of distinct privacy management strategies that are partially related to their level of privacy feature awareness. Using advanced Factor Analysis methods on the self-reported privacy behaviors and feature awareness of 308 Facebook users, we extrapolate six distinct privacy management strategies, including: Privacy Maximizers, Selective Sharers, Privacy Balancers, Self-Censors, Time Savers/Consumers, and Privacy Minimalists and six classes of privacy proficiency based on feature awareness, ranging from Novices to Experts. We then cluster users on these dimensions to form six distinct behavioral profiles of privacy management strategies and six awareness profiles for privacy proficiency. We further analyze these privacy profiles to suggest opportunities for training and education, interface redesign, and new approaches for personalized privacy recommendations.

Publication Date

2-1-2017

Publication Title

International Journal of Human Computer Studies

Volume

98

Number of Pages

95-108

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.09.006

Socpus ID

84995662325 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84995662325

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