Analysing privacy in online social media

Abstract

People share a wide variety of information on social media, including personal and sensitive information, without understanding the size of their audience which may cause privacy complications. The networked nature of the platforms further exacerbates these complications where the information can be shared without the information owner's control. People also struggle to achieve their intended audience using the privacy settings provided by the platforms. In this thesis, I analyse potential privacy violations caused by social media users and their networks, as well as the usage and understanding of privacy settings. I focus on Twitter which has rather simplistic privacy settings with binary states.

The first part of my studies includes investigating personal information disclosures by networks using congratulatory messages. I analyse these messages and detect various types of life events including relationships, illness, familial matters, and birthdays. I show that public replies are enough to infer the content of the original message, even if the event subject hides or deletes the message. I further focus on birthdays which is one of the most popular life events and the potential date of birth disclosure has security implications besides the privacy ones. I show that over 1K users have their date of birth exposed daily, where 10% of these users have protected their tweets. I also show that users react positively to these congratulatory messages even though these posts potentially disclose personal and sensitive information.

In the second part of my thesis, I focus on privacy settings on Twitter. I quantify the usage patterns of privacy settings and investigate the reasons for changing these settings between public and protected by conducting a mixed-method study. I show that there is a set of users who frequently utilize the privacy settings provided by the platform. I also show that users turn protected to share personal content and regulate boundaries while they turn public to interact with others in ways prevented by being protected.

In the last stage of the thesis, I investigate the user understanding of information and tweet visibility of different account types by conducting a user survey. I show that the users are aware of the visibility of their profile information and individual tweets. However, the visibility of followed topics, lists, and interactions with protected accounts is confusing. Less than a third of the survey participants were aware that a reply by a public account to a protected account's tweet would be publicly visible. Surprisingly, having a protected account did not result in a better understanding of the information or tweet visibility.

Actual functionalities and the user understanding of them should align so that users can take the right actions for desired levels of privacy protection in online social networks. I show that even with simplistic privacy settings, users have difficulty understanding the reach of their posts. Implications of interactions between users need to be clearly relayed. I give design suggestions to increase this awareness and for users to have better tools to manage their boundaries. I conclude the thesis by giving general implications around the studies conducted and possible future directions.