Abstract

Participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as Friendster, Tribe, or the Facebook allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with vast networks of friends - and, often, unknown numbers of strangers. In this paper we study patterns of information revelation in online social networks and their privacy implications. We analyze the online behavior of more than 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University students who have joined a popular social networking site catered to colleges. We evaluate the amount of information they disclose and study their usage of the site's privacy settings. We highlight potential attacks on various aspects of their privacy, and we show that only a minimal percentage of users changes the highly permeable privacy preferences.

Keywords

Internet privacyRevelationInformation privacyPersonally identifiable informationComputer scienceSocial network (sociolinguistics)World Wide WebSocial mediaComputer security

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Publication Info

Year
2005
Type
article
Pages
71-80
Citations
2020
Access
Closed

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Social Impact

Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions

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2020
OpenAlex

Cite This

Ralph Gross, Alessandro Acquisti (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. , 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1145/1102199.1102214

Identifiers

DOI
10.1145/1102199.1102214