# User Perception of Facebook App Data Access: A Comparison of Methods and Privacy Concerns
## 2 Related Work  
Since social media started emerging as a major paradigm of internet use in the early-to-mid 2000s, there have been studies of users' concerns and privacy preferences. Studies of how people choose to share information in social media, their privacy concerns, and their awareness about these issues has been covered in [1; 2; 3] to name a few. These studies took place in 2006 and 2007, and the landscape has changed a lot since then, particularly in terms of the privacy controls available to users and in how publicly information is shared by default. As privacy options became more sophisticated, research found that users were underutilizing these controls [4]. Tools to help users manage their privacy settings were even proposed [5]. More recent work has looked specifically at users' privacy concerns and utilization of privacy settings in these environments. In 2009, [PERSON] _et al._[6] studied users' privacy concerns in Facebook. Their subjects claimed to understand privacy issues but generally believed others were more at risk for privacy invasion than they themselves were. The authors attributed users' \"lax attitude\" to a number of factors, including psychological effects, the way people used the sites, and the fact that there was high gratification from use which led to downplaying the risks. The specific privacy concerns of students on social media and its implications for education were addressed in [7]. Experimental work in this space, which compared students' perceptions of danger before and after exposure to privacy-related information found, in their experimental configuration, no significant differences. They concluded that the students, as digital natives, were already well aware of the privacy risks associated with using social media [8]. [PERSON] [9] found differences in utilization of privacy features of social networking sites based on factors like age, gender, and experience. In [10], the authors built a model of social network usage considering users' privacy concerns and trust. They showed that social network use was negatively correlated with privacy concern but that his could be mitigated by building trust with users. These results echo earlier work from 2009 that showed users' trust in one another and in an online communities' information sharing norms mitigated privacy concerns [11]. Ref. [12] discusses a privacy feedback tool designed to help users better understand their identity exposure online. While we do not have users interact with this tool specifically, we do have them  
Figure 1: A screen capture of the creepy Facebook Stalker looking at a person’s profile, taken as a screen capture from the Take This Lollipop video, the app used in our study. look at information sources that show users what data Facebook apps can collect, thereby revealing information about how exposed a user's data is to these apps. Most closely related to our work is a 2011 study that investigated how users interacted with and understood Facebook apps' data access [13]. The study found that many users misunderstood or were confused by the policies that governed apps' access to their data. They also found that subjects' behavior or knowledge were not necessarily predictive of their level of privacy concern. Instead, privacy attitudes tended to change if the user personally experienced an adverse privacy event on Facebook. This is similar to the results from [6] discussed above; they found that personal, negative events had a big impact on users, but knowledge of bad events happening to others generally did not have much impact. This could be because there is not a good understanding among users about what information apps access from a user's profile, and only adverse events really make the point to users. Facebook reveals some information about what data apps will have access to when users install it, and users are left to rely on this and on their own understanding of Facebook's privacy policies in this context.