Social Computing - Privacy

Article Title: Social Computing Privacy Concerns: Antecedents & Effects

Written by: Oded Nov and Sunil Wattal

Comments: Eric

Summary:
This paper focused on privacy in a social network setting and how much information a person would share about themselves in certain social communities. Privacy concerns are not yet clear when it comes to social communities, and this paper researches two questions:

1. Antecedents of privacy concerns: "Do social norms contribute to individual's privacy concerns in online communities? Does trust in other network participants affect users' privacy concerns?"
2. Impact of privacy concerns: "Do higher levels of privacy concerns in an online community lead to lower levels of information sharing? What role does the position of the user within the network structure play in a user's willingness to share?"

The way they researched these questions was studying the way photos are shared on Flickr. There were 1270 people invited to do a web survey, and they only received 192 valid responses. Below is a picture of the sample questions asked in the survey.

This paper concluded that when people are concerned with privacy then they will not share as much information, but when it comes to a site like Flickr and other social computer sites they are more likely to share more information because they are familiar with the other users.

Discussion:
For this paper I thought the results would be similar to what they were. Things like Facebook where you know the people you are adding as friends, and the fact that you can control your privacy settings makes it easier for someone to share more information. If it's a new site that they aren't used to then they will probably share less. For photos on the other hand I would have thought people would share less or not allow their personal photos to be shown to the public community, but I guess it has the same effect as Facebook would. I think that for the future work it would be beneficial to get a wider range of participants, or just a larger number of them than this paper had. It may give a better idea as to who is willing to share information and tell why.