Designing Privacy into Online Communities

Abstract

Participation has exploded in online communities such as social networking sites, media sharing sites, and blogging sites. This widespread participation has generated substantial concern about the privacy implications of use. Although most online communities include privacy management features, it is not well understood how members of online communities take advantage of privacy management. To explore this issue, a study was conducted that compared privacy management on Facebook and MySpace, two popular social networking sites. Out of 222 subjects, 18.9% or nearly one in five had suffered a privacy incident within the past year. In a particularly striking result, less than half of those who suffered a privacy incident either reviewed or changed their privacy settings. So even though privacy incidents occur regularly, these findings indicate privacy management tools are not extensively used to protect privacy. This provides evidence of poor design of privacy management on social networking sites. To improve design, we argue that privacy must be conceptualized as a quality of an online space, rather than as a collection of access settings to be managed by individual members. This moves privacy from an individual consideration to the level of a structural component of a system. We offer an analysis of current privacy management practices and offer suggestions for improving the design of privacy management in social software.