Increasing Sharing Tendency Without Reducing Satisfaction: Finding the Best Privacy-Settings User Interface for Social Networks
Description
Privacy is a major concern of SNS (social networking site) users. Users’ profiles contain a large amount of personal information, and most users want to control who has access to this information. However, many SNS users report difficulties in managing their privacy settings. We conducted an online user experiment to systematically evaluate the behavioral and attitudinal effects of several design parameters of a SNS privacy settings interface. We show that the granularity of categories, the possibility to make exceptions, the default setting, and the order in which categories are being presented have strong effects on users’ evaluation of the system as well as their sharing behavior. Particularly, an interface that allows users to categorize their contacts into a small number of categories, that is set to shared-by-default, but that allows users to make exceptions for specific contacts results in the highest level of sharing and the highest user satisfaction.
Increasing Sharing Tendency Without Reducing Satisfaction: Finding the Best Privacy-Settings User Interface for Social Networks
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Privacy is a major concern of SNS (social networking site) users. Users’ profiles contain a large amount of personal information, and most users want to control who has access to this information. However, many SNS users report difficulties in managing their privacy settings. We conducted an online user experiment to systematically evaluate the behavioral and attitudinal effects of several design parameters of a SNS privacy settings interface. We show that the granularity of categories, the possibility to make exceptions, the default setting, and the order in which categories are being presented have strong effects on users’ evaluation of the system as well as their sharing behavior. Particularly, an interface that allows users to categorize their contacts into a small number of categories, that is set to shared-by-default, but that allows users to make exceptions for specific contacts results in the highest level of sharing and the highest user satisfaction.