Abstract
The high volume of user-generated content caused by the popular use of online social network services exposes users to different kinds of content that can be harmful or unwanted. Solutions to protect user privacy from such unwanted content cannot be generalized due to different perceptions of what is considered as unwanted for each individual. Thus, there is a substantial need to design a personalized privacy protection mechanism that takes into consideration differences in users’ privacy requirements. To achieve personalization, a user attitude about certain content must be acknowledged by the automated protection system. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between user attitude and user behavior among users from the Makkah region in Saudi Arabia to determine the applicability of considering users’ behaviors, as indicators of their attitudes towards unwanted content. We propose a semi-explicit attitude measure to infer user attitude from user-selected examples. Results revealed that semi-explicit attitude is a more reliable attitude measure to represent users’ actual attitudes than self-reported preferences for our sample. In addition, results show a statistically significant relationship between a user’s commenting behavior and the user’s semi-explicit attitude within our sample. Thus, commenting behavior is an effective indicator of the user’s semi-explicit attitude towards unwanted content for a user from the Makkah region in Saudi Arabia. We believe that our findings can have positive implications for designing an effective automated personalized privacy protection mechanism by reproducing the study considering other populations.
Highlights
Online users use different online social network (OSN) services such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and others for different purposes, varying from using them as informal communication channels with family and friends to considering them as formal communication channels in a work environment
The research question we aim to answer in this work is: do the behavioral factors of users reflect their actual attitudes towards unwanted content among users from the Makkah region in Saudi Arabia? Answering this question will help to decide if users’
The results reported in this work can be used as evidence of the applicability of behavioral factors as indicators of user attitude within our selected population
Summary
Online users use different online social network (OSN) services such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and others for different purposes, varying from using them as informal communication channels with family and friends to considering them as formal communication channels in a work environment. According to our previous work [2], 83% of online users receive annoying and duplicate content via WhatsApp messenger, and around 80% would prefer to have the control to block certain content from being seen or received in their social space. This exposure to unwanted content can negatively impact the privacy requirements desired for each individual [3]. Several studies proposed privacy protection mechanisms and policies to protect users from seeing or receiving such unwanted content in their social space.
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