Summary:
Oded Nov (New York University Polytechnic Institute) and Sunil Wattal (Temple University) wrote this paper to discuss their findings concerning the social aspects of privacy in social computing communities. These communities include blogs, forums, wikis, and social networking sites such as Facebook. They wanted to answer two main questions. First, do social norms and trust in fellow members have an impact on privacy concerns? And second, does the social network structure and length of membership play a part?
For their study, the authors looked at photo sharing on Flickr. People who use Flickr can choose to share their photos with a variety of groups ranging from everyone to nobody. 192 people agreed to share their information via Flickr's API, and from this the authors based their findings.
results = lol
In the end, the authors found that users will choose more restrictive privacy settings and limit what information they share because they do not trust other community members and because they follow that community's norms.
Discussion:
The "lol results" above could easily have been replaced with "who cares results" as far as I'm concerned. This research was mostly just a conglomeration of references to the things that other people had done combined with some overly complex statistics. I could really care less about how people on Flickr react to privacy settings and not trusting others. Seriously... I thought this paper was going to rock. Instead, it took me four hours to read it and write this blog about it because I immediately realized that I would rather watch Weather Scan over and over than get to page three. Maybe it's just me... or maybe they had an awesome idea and then lost it somewhere. Or maybe the "lol results" are what they wanted to show.
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