Surprise - Facebook users don't understand privacy settings - Columbia research

Full study - The Failure of Online Social Network Privacy Settings

Researchers from Columbia University have completed a study determining Facebook users' perceptions of their privacy settings. By tracking and interviewing 65 students aged 18 to 25, they found that every single one of the participants were sharing personal information in ways they hadn't intended when setting up their privacy settings. While 95% of participants were initially confident that their settings protected the information they wanted to protect, participants eventually found that information they wanted to hide was public (93.8%), and information they wanted to share was hidden (84%). Also in the study, users' most important reasons for protecting their privacy online was to protect their online reputation (49%), to safeguard against identity theft and other economic risks (38%), and to protect against general security threats (12%).

Abstract

Increasingly, people are sharing sensitive personal information via online social networks (OSN). While such networks do permit users to control what they share with whom, access control policies are notoriously difficult to configure correctly; this raises the question of whether OSN users' privacy settings match their sharing intentions. We present the results of an empirical evaluation that measures privacy attitudes and intentions and compares these against the privacy settings on Facebook. Our results indicate a serious mismatch: every one of the 65 participants in our study confirmed that at least one of the identified violations was in fact a sharing violation. In other words, OSN users' privacy settings are incorrect. Furthermore, a majority of users cannot or will not x such errors. We conclude that the current approach to privacy settings is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed; a fundamentally different approach is needed. We present recommendations to ameliorate the current problems, as well as provide suggestions for future research…