Are privacy concerns a turn-off? Engagement and privacy in social networks
Venue
Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), ACM (2012) (to appear)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Jessica Staddon, David Huffaker, Larkin Brown, Aaron Sedley
BibTeX
Abstract
We describe the survey results from a representative sample of 1,075 U.S. social
network users who use Facebook as their primary network. Our results show a strong
association between low engagement and privacy concern. Specifically, users who
report concerns around sharing control, comprehension of sharing practices or
general Facebook privacy concern, also report consistently less time spent as well
as less (self-reported) posting, commenting and “Like”ing of content. The limited
evidence of other significant differences between engaged users and others suggests
that privacy-related concerns may be an important gate to engagement. Indeed,
privacy concern and network size are the only malleable attributes that we find to
have significant association with engagement. We manually categorize the privacy
concerns finding that many are nonspecific and not associated with negative
personal experiences. Finally, we identify some education and utility issues
associated with low social network activity, suggesting avenues for increasing
engagement amongst current users.
