DocumentCode :
2044728
Title :
Facebook users have become much more private: A large-scale study
Author :
Dey, Ratan ; Jelveh, Zubin ; Ross, Keith
Author_Institution :
Polytech. Inst., New York Univ., New York, NY, USA
fYear :
2012
fDate :
19-23 March 2012
Firstpage :
346
Lastpage :
352
Abstract :
We investigate whether Facebook users have become more private in recent years. Specifically, we examine if there have been any important trends in the information Facebook users reveal about themselves on their public profile pages since early 2010. To this end, we have crawled the public profile pages of 1.4 million New York City (NYC) Facebook users in March 2010 and again in June 2011. We have found that NYC users in our sample have become dramatically more private during this period. For example, in March 2010 only 17.2% of users in our sample hid their friend lists, whereas in June 2011, just 15 months later, 52.6% of the users hid their friend lists. We explore privacy trends for several personal attributes including friend list, networks, relationship, high school name and graduation year, gender, and hometown. We find that privacy trends have become more pronounced for certain demographics. Finally, we attempt to determine the primary causes behind the dramatic decrease in the amount of information Facebook users reveal about themselves to the general public.
Keywords :
data privacy; social networking (online); Facebook users; NYC users; New York City; friend list; gender; graduation year; high school name; hometown; networks; personal attributes; privacy trends; public profile pages; relationship; Cities and towns; Data privacy; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Facebook; Privacy;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Lugano
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-0905-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4673-0906-6
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/PerComW.2012.6197508
Filename :
6197508
Link To Document :
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