Study: People Manage Their Privacy on Facebook Naturally Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (04/20/09) Noronen, Vis
as it appeared in the April 22, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews.
Trust is a key factor in the way people manage their privacy when using social media tools, according to researchers at Finland's Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). Although users cannot control what other people publish on Facebook and similar sites, they tend to provide only information about themselves that they want other people to see, and they avoid publishing negative information about other people, say researchers Airi Lampinen, Sakari Tamminen, and Antti Oulasvirta. People will limit their number of friends, and also will exchange private messages within more defined closed groups when they need to update their status, the researchers discovered during interviews with users of social media. "People protect their own privacy and other people's privacy instinctively, often almost without noticing," Lampinen says. "To support these activities, social networking sites need to provide users with easy-to-use privacy management that is interlinked with the overall use of the sites." View Full Article
