2005/11/07 by Ralph Gross, Alessandro Acquisti · 4 citations
Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data #Internet privacy #Revelation #Information privacy #Personally identifiable information #Computer science #Social network (sociolinguistics) #World Wide Web #Social media #Computer security
paper · doi:10.1145/1102199.1102214
openalex publication_date 2005/11/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as Friendster, Tribe, or the Facebook allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with vast networks of friends - and, often, unknown numbers of strangers. In this paper we study patterns of information revelation in online social networks and their privacy implications. We analyze the online behavior of more than 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University students who have joined a popular social networking site catered to colleges. We evaluate the amount of information they disclose and study their usage of the site's privacy settings. We highlight potential attacks on various aspects of their privacy, and we show that only a minimal percentage of users changes the highly permeable privacy preferences.