Default Privacy Settings Research Articles

Exposure to Alcohol-Related Content on Social-Media.

Exposure to alcohol-related content is unavoidable on social media. In this study level of exposure to alcohol marketing content on Twitter and Instagram for those in recovery was examined, and the effectiveness of privacy settings to mitigate exposing content was assessed. Four fictitious accounts were created on Instagram and Twitter in a case-control design in Spring 2022. All accounts followed 19 alcohol brands, with two accounts (1 male, 1 female) following only alcohol brand accounts while the other two (1 male, 1 female) additionally followed recovery resources. Four weeks of data collection were done with default privacy and advertisement settings, followed by two additional weeks of data collection with advertisement and privacy settings for blocking alcohol content. Privacy settings did not help with blocking the alcoholic brand-related photographic content on either platform, meaning that the accounts received the same amount of alcohol-related content from the accounts they were following with and without changing the privacy settings. However, Twitter algorithms were more effective in suppressing alcohol-related content for accounts following recovery resources and alcohol brands. These results suggest that risks of exposure totriggering/cueing photographic alcohol content may outweigh the benefits of social media for social connection if an individual is considering seeking recovery.

Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers: Low-cost Attacks, Quantitative Analyses, and Efficient Mitigations

Contact discovery allows users of mobile messengers to conveniently connect with people in their address book. In this work, we demonstrate that severe privacy issues exist in currently deployed contact discovery methods and propose suitable mitigations. Our study of three popular messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram) shows that large-scale crawling attacks are (still) possible. Using an accurate database of mobile phone number prefixes and very few resources, we queried 10 % of US mobile phone numbers for WhatsApp and 100 % for Signal. For Telegram, we find that its API exposes a wide range of sensitive information, even about numbers not registered with the service. We present interesting (cross-messenger) usage statistics, which also reveal that very few users change the default privacy settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that currently deployed hashing-based contact discovery protocols are severely broken by comparing three methods for efficient hash reversal. Most notably, we show that with the password cracking tool “JTR,” we can iterate through the entire worldwide mobile phone number space in < 150 s on a consumer-grade GPU. We also propose a significantly improved rainbow table construction for non-uniformly distributed input domains that is of independent interest. Regarding mitigations, we most notably propose two novel rate-limiting schemes: our incremental contact discovery for services without server-side contact storage strictly improves over Signal’s current approach while being compatible with private set intersection, whereas our differential scheme allows even stricter rate limits at the overhead for service providers to store a small constant-size state that does not reveal any contact information.

The Effect of Acute Stress on Privacy Decision-Making

Internet users’ digital privacy decisions are closely connected with their level of trust of information security, privacy concern, and perceived risks and benefits of internet use. One psychological factor that may potentially alter such privacy-related behaviors is acute stress, as it has shown to influence individual’s general decision-making. The goal of this between-subject designed research is to explore whether acute stress can affect decision-making in the digital privacy domain. Additionally, other privacy-related factors that may moderate this relationship, including trust and privacy fatigue, will be examined. We expect that participants who are exposed to acute stress will have poorer privacy decision-making outcomes, which will be represented by more frequent acceptance of online cookies and default privacy settings. Moreover, this relationship is expected to be magnified among individuals with low levels of Internet trust and those with high levels of privacy fatigue.

Explainable Machine Learning for Default Privacy Setting Prediction

When requesting a web-based service, users often fail in setting the website’s privacy settings according to their self privacy preferences. Being overwhelmed by the choice of preferences, a lack of knowledge of related technologies or unawareness of the own privacy preferences are just some reasons why users tend to struggle. To address all these problems, privacy setting prediction tools are particularly well-suited. Such tools aim to lower the burden to set privacy preferences according to owners’ privacy preferences. To be in line with the increased demand for explainability and interpretability by regulatory obligations – such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe – in this paper an explainable model for default privacy setting prediction is introduced. Compared to the previous work we present an improved feature selection, increased interpretability of each step in model design and enhanced evaluation metrics to better identify weaknesses in the model’s design before it goes into production. As a result, we aim to provide an explainable and transparent tool for default privacy setting prediction which users easily understand and are therefore more likely to use.

The privacy paradox in using Facebook among Arab teens: between declarations and behaviour

The present study examines the issue of privacy among teens using the social network, Facebook. It examines, on the one hand, how Arab teens view the issue of privacy, and on the other hand, how participants actually behave. The study is based on a questionnaire delivered to 500 Arab teens from Israel. The study's results show that certain private information is more readily disclosed by Arab teens than one's family. Most participants reported that they are aware of the issue of privacy yet do not make changes to the site's default privacy settings. This behaviour supports the existence of some degree of the privacy paradox among participants, which is likely to be expressed in various online interactions. The results of the study can help educators and parents gain a better understanding of teens' behaviour in the digital arena, perhaps contributing to the creation of better and more suitable educational approaches.

The privacy paradox in using Facebook among Arab teens: between declarations and behaviour

The present study examines the issue of privacy among teens using the social network, Facebook. It examines, on the one hand, how Arab teens view the issue of privacy, and on the other hand, how participants actually behave. The study is based on a questionnaire delivered to 500 Arab teens from Israel. The study's results show that certain private information is more readily disclosed by Arab teens than one's family. Most participants reported that they are aware of the issue of privacy yet do not make changes to the site's default privacy settings. This behaviour supports the existence of some degree of the privacy paradox among participants, which is likely to be expressed in various online interactions. The results of the study can help educators and parents gain a better understanding of teens' behaviour in the digital arena, perhaps contributing to the creation of better and more suitable educational approaches.

Issues and Challenges of Cyber Security for Social Networking Sites (Facebook)

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Google+, and LinkedIn are the popular social sites. Facebook is most popular social networking site. Social sites are most common platform to communicate with their other friends, family and share thoughts, photos, videos and lots of information. Social networking websites have become platforms for cybercriminals for cybercrime; cybercriminals exploit sensitive and personal information through social engineering and reverse social engineering. It is usual for the users of social websites to share information; however they lose privacy, while sharing information with strangers, they can fall in honey trap made by them. Privacy has become an important concern in online social networking sites. Users are unaware of the privacy risks involved when they share their sensitive information on the social network sites. The default settings share everything, users have to change their default privacy setting options to make their accounts and personal information more secure. Security attacks continue to be a major concern of all users. How to keep social networking sites more secure and more private are the challenges that have been concern for every user. It is difficult for social networking sites and users to make and adjust privacy setting to protect privacy without practical and effective way to identify measure and evaluate privacy. Maximum numbers of users are not aware of the security risk associated whenever they shared sensitive data on the social sites, so that privacy concern will be raised among those online communications if their personal data has been shared to other users. The users should be aware of their privacy quotient and should know where they stand in the privacy measuring scale. Unfortunately many users are not aware of this and become victim of privacy and identity breach. So we conducted a survey to find users view regarding security and privacy of social networking sites and regarding default privacy setting improvement particularly Facebook.

Mapping User Preference to Privacy Default Settings

Managing the privacy of online information can be a complex task often involving the configuration of a variety of settings. For example, Facebook users determine which audiences have access to their profile information and posts, how friends can interact with them through tagging, and how others can search for them—and many more privacy tasks. In most cases, the default privacy settings are permissive and appear to be designed to promote information sharing rather than privacy. Managing privacy online can be complex and often users do not change defaults or use granular privacy settings. In this article, we investigate whether default privacy settings on social network sites could be more customized to the preferences of users. We survey users' privacy attitudes and sharing preferences for common SNS profile items. From these data, we explore using audience characterizations of profile items to quantify fit scores that indicate how well default privacy settings represent user privacy preferences. We then explore the fit of various schemes, including examining whether privacy attitude segmentation can be used to improve default settings. Our results suggest that using audience characterizations from community data to create default privacy settings can better match users' desired privacy settings.

Ethical Consequences of Bounded Rationality in the Internet of Things

One of the main challenges that the arriving paradigm of Internet of Things brings to society is providing and securing individual privacy. There are lots of obstacles which prevents us from successfully confronting such a challenge. In this paper we are going to deal with one such obstacle, and that is the bounded rationality of humans as participants in the environment of Internet of Things. We argue that the ethical approach to the vision of the Internet of Things has to include the notion of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality of users impedes the possibility of giving informed consent. Informed consent is required when getting permission for collecting and using somebody’s personal information. Lastly, we discuss the need for a paternalistic approach of maximum possible default privacy settings without asking for consent, given the seriousness of all potential risks.

Ethical Consequences of Bounded Rationality in the Internet of Things

One of the main challenges that the arriving paradigm of Internet of Things brings to society is providing and securing individual privacy. There are lots of obstacles which prevents us from successfully confronting such a challenge. In this paper we are going to deal with one such obstacle, and that is the bounded rationality of humans as participants in the environment of Internet of Things. We argue that the ethical approach to the vision of the Internet of Things has to include the notion of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality of users impedes the possibility of giving informed consent. Informed consent is required when getting permission for collecting and using somebody’s personal information. Lastly, we discuss the need for a paternalistic approach of maximum possible default privacy settings without asking for consent, given the seriousness of all potential risks.

A New Privacy Paradox: Young People and Privacy on Social Network Sites

There is a widespread impression that younger people are less concerned with privacy than older people. For example, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg justified changing default privacy settings to allow everyone to see and search for names, gender, city and other information by saying “Privacy is no longer a social norm”. We address this question and test it using a representative sample from Britain based on the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS). Contrary to conventional wisdom, OxIS shows a negative relationship between age and privacy; young people are actually more likely to have taken action to protect their privacy than older people. Privacy online is a strong social norm. We develop a sociological theory that accounts for the fact of youth concern. The new privacy paradox is that these sites have become so embedded in the social lives of users that they must disclose information on them despite the fact that these sites do not provide adequate privacy controls.

PHR User Privacy Concerns and Behaviours

Results of an empirical study on the privacy concerns, attitudes, and behaviour of personal health record (PHR) users are presented. The study addressed the following questions: (1) What are the factors influencing privacy concerns of PHR users? (2) To what extent do PHR users read privacy agreements and which factors are in play when they fail to read them. (3) Are the behaviour and attitudes of PHR users consistent with respect to reading privacy agreements and using privacy settings? We infer from the study results that the factors influencing privacy concerns of general online users (as reported in literature) also apply to PHR users. In spite of privacy concerns, 60% of the respondents in our study reported not reading privacy agreements. PHR users who were highly concerned about privacy did not report changing their default privacy settings (as offered in a typical social networking website) in a manner consistent with their stated attitudes towards privacy. Based on the issues identified in the study we conclude with a number of design recommendations for privacy-friendly PHR systems.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Critical Observations on the Proposed Reform of the EU Data Protection Framework

Recent changes in market dynamics of electronic and mobile commerce mean that users of online services are no longer “passive agents of consumption”. Instead online business models increasingly provide a platform for user interaction while simultaneously relying on the contributions made by those users for the population of those spaces. Like many other online services that form part of the Web 2.0 economy, SNS, in the main, are offered free at the point of access. Instead of charging their users a monetary fee, most SNS providers generate revenue through payments they receive from third parties in exchange for the right directly to display advertising to their users or in exchange for providing aggregated data on those users’ behaviour, likes and dislikes. This means that users now “pay’” for online services with the personal information they disclose. Despite repeated announcements by members of the SNS industry that they are committed to the protection of their users’ online privacy, it can therefore not be denied that, in practice, a high level of privacy protection is likely to be in stark conflict with SNS providers’ business objectives and that, in reality, most SNS providers are entirely dependent for their market position on promoting an environment that encourages “openness” and widespread information-sharing by their users through the use of default privacy settings and the subtle encouragement of maximum disclosure in the form of financial and non-financial incentives (for example, additional “free” functionality). This article will examine the implications of these technical, economical and social developments of internet users’ rights to privacy under the current EU data protection framework and whether the changes to that framework proposed by the European Commission in 2012 are likely to address the policy issues identified.

PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK

The privacy paradox describes people's willingness to disclose personal information on social network sites despite expressing high levels of concern. In this study, we employ the distinction between institutional and social privacy to examine this phenomenon. We investigate what strategies undergraduate students have developed, and their motivations for using specific strategies. We employed a mixed-methods approach that included 77 surveys and 21 in-depth interviews. The results suggest that, in addition to using the default privacy settings, students have developed a number of strategies to address their privacy needs. These strategies are used primarily to guard against social privacy threats and consist of excluding contact information, using the limited profile option, untagging and removing photographs, and limiting Friendship requests from strangers. Privacy strategies are geared toward managing the Facebook profile, which we argue functions as a front stage. This active profile management allows users to negotiate the need for connecting on Facebook with the desire for increased privacy. Thus, users disclose information, because they have made a conscious effort to protect themselves against potential violations. We conclude that there is a tilt toward social privacy concerns. Little concern was raised about institutional privacy and no strategies were in place to protect against threats from the use of personal data by institutions. This is relevant for policy discussions, because it suggests that the collection, aggregation, and utilization of personal data for targeted advertisement have become an accepted social norm.

Friendship and Privacy in Online Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) have become extremely popular in recent years. Users actively interact in these networks and share large amounts of personal information. This has led to emergence of a treasure trove of data for many entities, from marketers and spammers to employers and intelligence agencies, which has become a serious privacy concern. Previous works have addressed many aspects about privacy in OSNs such as characterizing potential privacy leakage [16], possible ways for inferring sensitive private information [9], [20], and appropriateness of default privacy settings [13]. In contrast, we focus on the entity who plays the main role in guarding privacy: the user. By sending out friend requests to unknown users in one of the largest OSNs, we provide evidence that a considerable portion of OSN users are willing to let a stranger, possibly an adversary, into their social network, thus granting her access to the users’ personal information and to some extent to those of their friends. We study several factors that might foster such behavior, and measure the amount of information that will consequently become accessible. We find that for more than 95% of the users who accept our friend requests, we gained access to personal information that would not otherwise be accessible. We also show that the majority of the users who accept the requests have indeed changed their default privacy settings to restrict access to some parts of their personal information to their friends while making them publicly inaccessible. Our observations suggest that in addition to the technical attempts to protect user privacy, public awareness should be raised about the implications of accepting friendship requests from untrusted sources. Furthermore, the success rate of an adversary in establishing links in OSNs can help revisiting the key assumptions underpinning the design of some systems such as OSN-based Sybil defense systems.

Facebook activity of residents and fellows and its impact on the doctor–patient relationship

AimFacebook is an increasingly popular online social networking site. The purpose of this study was to describe the Facebook activity of residents and fellows and their opinions regarding the impact...