Private Date Exposure in Facebook and the Impact of Comprehensible Audience Selection Controls

Abstract

Privacy in Online Social Networks (OSNs) evolved from a niche topic to a broadly discussed issue in a wide variety of media. Nevertheless, OSNs drastically increase the amount of information that can be found about individuals on the web. To estimate the dimension of data leakage in OSNs, we measure the real exposure of user content of 4,182 Facebook users from 102 countries in the most popular OSN, Facebook. We further quantify the impact of a comprehensible privacy control interface that has been shown to extremely decrease configuration efforts as well as misconfiguration in audience selection. Our study highlights the importance of usable security. (i) The total amount of content that is visible to Facebook users does not dramatically decrease by simplifying the audience selection interface, but the composition of the visible content changes. (ii) Which information is uploaded to Facebook as well as which information is shared with whom strongly depends on the user's country of origin.