Viewing the Viewers: Publishers' Desires and Viewers' Privacy Concerns in Social Networks

摘要

Social networking sites are starting to provide users with services such as LinkedIn's `Who's viewed my profile' feature, giving information about their audiences' composition and behavior. Providing information about content viewers to content publishers, however, raises new privacy concerns for viewers themselves, possibly creating a chilling effect on viewer behavior. We report on a study of 718 respondents using Mechanical Turk across two surveys to study publishers' ({N=402}) use and expectations of information about their viewers, and viewers' ({N=316}) privacy behaviors and concerns in the face of such visibility. Our findings indicate that publishers are generally mindful of viewers' privacy; viewers engage in various self-censorship behaviors in the face of visibility; and in some cases (e.g., dating sites) significant gender differences exist about what information respondents felt should be shared with publishers and required of viewers.