Friends Only: Examining a Privacy-Enhancing Behavior in Facebook

Friends Only:Examining a Privacy-Enhancing Behavior in Facebook
Fred Stutzman and Jacob Kramer-Duffield, UNC

Changes in SNS adoption landscape
Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009, 2010

Changes in SNS landscape
Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009, 2010

Changes in Facebook
Terms ofservicechange
Open toregionalnetworks
Open toselectworkplaces
Open to most colleges
End ofregionalnetworks
Publicprofiles
Beacon
News Feedintroduced
Facebookat Harvard
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Changes in Facebook

Implications of Change
Shift from common identity to common bond
e.g. Ren, Kraut & Kiesler, 2007; Sassenberg, 2002
Uses, flows of social capital and social support
e.g. Lampe et al. 2008
Management of disclosureboundaries and contexts

Managing Contexts
Presence of multiple social groups
Behavioral strategies
Mental strategies
“Least common denominator”
Source:Lampinen et al., 2009

Context Tension
Connections across status and power boundaries
Propriety, work, family
Harms from crossed boundaries
Inadvertent disclosures across contexts
Source:Skeels and Grudin, 2009

Putting Context in Context
Friendster
“Burners, gay men, and bloggers”
Myspace
Teens and mirror profiles
Twitter
Practical obscurity
Source: boyd, 2006, 2007, Stutzman and Hartzog, 2009

Going Friends-Only
Moving profile from network-viewable to viewable only by Friends
Implications:
Searching, browsing and finding
Networked information contribution, apps
Person perception, relational formation

Going Friends-Only
Publicly available information: Name, city, gender, photo, list of friends, fan pages, networks, friends list (temporarily)

Going Friends-Only
Use Privacy Settings: 83.2%
Friends-only: 58.3%
2005: 5% (+/-1), 2006: 12% (+/- 1), 2007: 23% (+/- 4), 2008: 58% (+/- 5)

Going Friends-Only
RQ: What factors are associated with having a friends-only profile?
Boundary regulation theories of privacy
Altman, Derlega and Chaikin
Applied in HCI, Social Computing
Palen and Dourish, Tufekci, Dwyer
Applied in Organizations (Allen et al.), Education (Mazer et al.), Communication (Petronio, Child et al.)
Others
Self

Petronio’s CPM
Process of Communication Privacy Management
Rule Development
Who gets to know what
Boundary coordination
Applying rules-in-context
Boundary turbulence
Reacting to events, managingand regulating rules
Source:Petronio, 2003

Study Design
Web-based survey
Pilot test, n=76
Full survey, June 2008, n=494
Response Analysis
94% of respondents usedFacebook
Analytical sample, n=444
Males, minorities, youngerstudents under-represented
Analysis is unweighted, FPCnot applied

Analytic Plan
RQ: What factors are associated with having a friends-only profile?
DV: Having a friends only profile
Models
Null and demographic baselines
Rule development
Boundary coordination
Boundary turbulence
Evaluation
Within comparison likelihood ratio test
Between comparison with AIC, BIC, ROC

Baseline Model
Demographic factors
School year, gender, ethnicity
Facebook use factors
Number of friends, length of membership, time spent on site

Rule Development
Who do you tell what?
H1: Strong ties = inward-focused
H2: Random ties = outside-focused
e.g.Strahilevitz, 2005
Evaluation
No items, blocks significant
Problems: Lack of variation due to normative orientation in friending practices; Instrumentation
Scale: Lampe et al., 2006, 2008; Ellison et al. 2007

Boundary Coordination
Coordinating permeability rules
Friends can know my gossip
People around campus shouldn’t
Salient audiences
Intended audience
Expected audience

Boundary Coordination
Exploring the effects of “expectancy violations”
Violations effects coded
Analyzed simultaneously
Evaluation
Weak tie expectancy violations result in 3.31 increase in odds of beingfriends-only
The meaningful externalboundary?

Boundary Turbulence
Maintenance and (re)negotiation of disclosure boundaries
Predictors
Conversant privacy scale
Advised someone to change FB profile/picture…
Wall management scale
Removed wall post (self/other)
Covariates
Gender, profile management effort
Alphas: Conversant: .69, Wall: .73, Effort: .79

Boundary Turbulence
Exploring effects of interpersonal privacy management
Analyzed simultaneously
Evaluation
Individuals who engage inhigher amounts of conversant management morelikely to have friends-only profile
Gender, effort not significant

Model Comparison
Compare predictive strength of the models
Non-nested comparisons employ AIC, BIC, ROC, etc.
All models represent incremental improvements

Goals
Explore the process of going friends-only
Apply theories of boundary regulation, and Communications Privacy Management, in SNS context
Identify and prioritize models for further exploration

Implications
Dynamic identification of functional network boundary
Opportunity to create non-reciprocal communication interfaces
Increase opportunities for collaboration around privacy settings

Thank you!
Fred Stutzman
Fred.stutzman@unc.edu
http://twitter.com/fstutzman
Jacob Kramer-Duffield
jkramerd@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/jaykaydee

Friends Only: Examining a Privacy-Enhancing Behavior in Facebook

by Fred Stutzman on Apr 16, 2010

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