Contextual gaps: privacy issues on Facebook
Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebookss more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaums treatment of privacy as contextual integrity. Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users, but a users friends information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of friendship online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.
privacy facebook social networking contextual integrity internet