Designing the default privacy settings for facebook applications

Abstract

We frame privacy from the perspective of contextual integrity. Through an online experiment, we explore how the alignment of default privacy settings with the context of an information request would impact a user's information disclosure behavior and privacy perceptions. The field experiment is designed as a between-subject experiment with four conditions of the apps' default settings, in the context of installing a third-party application that creates a birthday calendar on Facebook. Our preliminary findings suggest that default privacy settings that are context-relevant may help users make better informed privacy decisions, increase their likelihood of engaging with an app, and improve their privacy perceptions of the app.