Market for Data Protection in Social Networks
Article: “The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks” by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch.
URL = http://preibusch.de/publications/Bonneau_Preibusch__Privacy_Jungle__2009-05-26.pdf
Description
Michael Zimmer:
"The University of Cambridge researchers conducted a thorough analysis of the privacy practices and policies in online social networks, revealing some interesting results regarding how social networking sites differentiate (or not) themselves in the “privacy marketplace.” (Technology Review has a good summary of the research, and some of its implications, including quotes from myself).
They summarize their results as follows (emphasis added):
- "Our contribution is threefold. First, we report the results of a thorough analysis of the privacy supply in the social networking market (Section 4). Our data supports some common assumptions, such as a generally low quality of privacy policies, usability problems, and poor security practices. It also provides some surprises such as promotion of photo-sharing being far more common than game-playing, and a huge diversity of privacy controls available in different networks which is not effectively conveyed to users.
Second, we aggregate our data into overall privacy and functionality scores for each site, and use these to find which general factors may influence a site’s privacy practices (Section 5). Again, we find interesting results, such as niche sites offering significantly less sophisticated privacy controls than general-purpose sites, positive correlations between privacy and the age, size, and popularity of a site. Privacy and functionality aren’t strong correlated, but sites that promote on privacy are often found having less favourable privacy practices. We also find evidence that sites with better privacy are growing ahead of the market, while those that mention their privacy are falling behind.
Finally, we propose a novel economic model to explain the observed under-supply and under-promotion of privacy as a rational choice by the competing social networking providers. Our model assumes the existence of consumers with varying degrees of privacy concern. We conjecture that websites seek to maximise their desirability to both populations by not raising privacy concerns for the majority of users, while minimising criticism from the privacy-sensitive."
Their final point is worth special consideration: According to the authors, social networking sites might build robust privacy settings to appease privacy advocates, but they don’t promote them and/or make them difficult to use so the majority of users don’t bother to change their default settings, thereby keeping the open flows of personal information undisturbed." (http://michaelzimmer.org/2009/06/13/the-laws-of-social-networking/)