Frederic Stutzman

Friends only: examining a privacy-enhancing behavior in facebook

Privacy practices in social network sites often appear paradoxical, as content-sharing behavior stands in conflict with the need to reduce disclosure-related harms. In this study we explore privacy in social network sites as a contextual information practice, managed by a process of boundary regulation. Drawing on a sample survey of undergraduate Facebook users, we examine a particular privacy-enhancing practice: having a friends-only Facebook profile. Particularly, we look at the association between network composition, expectancy violations, interpersonal privacy practices and having a friends-only profile. We find that expectancy violations by weak ties and increased levels of interpersonal privacy management are positively associated with having a friends-only profile. We conclude with a discussion of how these findings may be integrated into the design of systems to facilitate interaction while enhancing individual privacy.

Factors mediating disclosure in social network sites

In this paper, we explore how privacy settings and privacy policy consumption (reading the privacy policy) affect the relationship between privacy attitudes and disclosure behaviors. We present results from a survey completed by 122 users of Facebook regarding their information disclosure practices and their attitudes about privacy. Based on our data, we develop and evaluate a model for understanding factors that affect how privacy attitudes influence disclosure and discuss implications for social network sites. Our analysis shows that the relationship between privacy attitudes and certain types of disclosures (those furthering contact) are controlled by privacy policy consumption and privacy behaviors. This provides evidence that social network sites could help mitigate concerns about disclosure by providing transparent privacy policies and privacy controls.

Boundary regulation in social media

The management of group context in socially mediating technologies is an important challenge for the design community. To better understand how users manage group context, we explored the practice of multiple profile management in social media. In doing so, we observed creative and opportunistic strategies for group context management. We found that multiple profile maintenance is motivated by four factors: privacy, identity, utility, and propriety. Drawing on these motives, we observe a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors: pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation. Based on these findings, we encourage designers of group context management systems to more broadly consider motives and practices of group separations in social media. Group context management systems should be privacy-enhancing, but a singular focus on privacy overlooks a range of other group context management practices.

Effects of structure and interaction style on distinct search tasks

In this paper we present the results of a study that investigates the relationships between search tasks, information architecture, and interaction style. Three kinds of search tasks (simple lookup, complex lookup and exploratory) were performed using three different user interfaces (standard web site, hierarchical text-based faceted interface, and dynamic query faceted interface) for a large-scale public corpus containing semi-structured statistical data and reports. Twenty-eight people conducted the three kinds of searches in a between-subjects study and twelve others conducted the three kinds of searches on all three systems in a within-subjects study. Quantitative results demonstrate that the alternative general-purpose user interfaces that accept automated structuring of data offer comparable effectiveness, efficiency, and aesthetics to manually constructed architectures. Qualitative results demonstrate the manual architectures are favored.

Selection and context scoping for digital video collections: an investigation of youtube and blogs

Digital curators are faced with decisions about what part of the ever-growing, ever-evolving space of digital information to collect and preserve. The recent explosion of web video on sites such as YouTube presents curators with an even greater challenge - how to sort through and filter a large amount of information to find, assess and ultimately preserve important, relevant, and interesting video. In this paper, we describe research conducted to help inform digital curation of on-line video. Since May 2007, we have been monitoring the results of 57 queries on YouTube related to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. We report results comparing these data to blogs that point to candidate videos on YouTube and discuss the effects of query-based harvesting as a collection development strategy.

Modeling cultural acquisition in online social networks

This research proposes to study the relationship between audience, context and disclosure in online social network sites. Studying a population of college students, the researchers will use a survey to explore how social maturity, perceived friend network size, and long-term goals affect the identity presented in online social networks. This goal of this analysis is to document a process of identity formation in online social networks. In the model, individuals choose strategies of identity presentation based on notions of in-group awareness, future-selves and social context. This model will be tested with survey methods.

Self-Representation of Online Identity in Collected Hyperlinks

Online identity is the representation of ones persona in a digital context. A primary factor in this representation is the collection of links that represent an individual in search. Designed by the authors, claimID (http://claimID.com) is a web service that enables individuals to use the hyperlinks about them to create a rich presentation of their online identity. In this paper, we analyze patterns of self-representation of online identity as observed in claimID.