Simulating the effect of privacy concerns in online social networks

Abstract

While sharing information is the main purpose of online social networks (OSN), privacy is a major concern. It has been argued that the lack of privacy protection caused the massive departure of users from MySpace in 2008 [1] - specially, due to mass media coverage on dangers of teenagers' public profiles and the appearance of Facebook, which provided a more private OSN. Besides mass media, we explore the impact of family and friends in instilling privacy concerns on teenagers. We develop an agent-based model to simulate propagation of privacy concerns through connection in a social network, and the effect of individual users' privacy decisions on the level of overall participation in an OSN. We report the results of simulating different privacy propagation factors. Our results are useful to understand and predict hidden patterns of user behavior that lead to changes in the number of active users in an OSN.