Invited Paper: A Model of Paradoxical Privacy Behavior in Online Users

摘要

Recent privacy research has identified some paradoxical behavior that online users often display, such as claiming to be conservative and then actually oversharing. In particular, recent work by Brandimarte et al. discussed an apparent privacy paradox in online interactions. According to the study, users tend to over-disclose private information if they perceive to have control over the disclosure of their content. In this paper, we formally explain this apparent paradox in user privacy behavior as a straightforward optimization of comfort with sharing and perceived control. We describe the interests of a social network site in managing user privacy options. Namely, a site seeks to maximize perceived user control, while managing costs associated with providing that control. Furthermore, we extend the discussion for the case of ynamic time, and study an optimal control problem for the site as it tries to allocate resources toward user privacy control.