Privacy in Social Networks

Facebook Background

Biggest social network with 1 billion users

Most information defaults to public

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Frictionless Sharing

Take this Lollipop

http://www.takethislollipop.com/

Pinterest

Social Image Bookmarking

Users curate collections of images on “boards”

Experienced very fast growth 1 million unique users in January 2011 12 million unique users in January 2012

FourSquare

Location-based services and sharing

Lets you “checkin” at stores, offices, monuments, airports, your girlfriend’s house, etc.

Example of larger location-sharing movement in social media

Facebook, Twitter allow checkins now

Checkins and Data

Twitter Background

Microblogging service Accessible over the web or mobile devices Users post 140-character “tweets” Follow the tweets of others

200 million active users About 40% only read content (no posts)

Please Rob Me

Profiling People and Relationships

What are more advanced ways to use social media data?

Understanding “hidden” traits of people and their relationships

What we can find out

Using information from Facebook or Twitter, researchers can accurately guess your Age Race Gender Sexual Orientation Socioeconomic Status Drug and alcohol use Religion and more

Results from one Study

Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. 2013. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Take-away message

People share vast amounts of information about themselves, their relationships, and their activities online

Using social media profiles, we can Gain interesting insights about what people say and

do Compute information about people and their

relationships