2013 Young - Quan-Hase Privacy Protection Strategies On Facebook

Information, Communication & Society
ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20
PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK
Alyson Leigh Young & Anabel Quan-Haase
To cite this article: Alyson Leigh Young & Anabel Quan-Haase (2013) PRIVACY PROTECTION
STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK, Information, Communication & Society, 16:4, 479-500, DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2013.777757
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.777757
Published online: 04 Apr 2013.
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Download by: [UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL] Date: 16 November 2017, At: 22:31

Alyson Leigh Young &
Anabel Quan-Haase
PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES

ON FACEBOOK
Downloaded by [UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL] at 22:31 16 November 2017
The Internet privacy paradox revisited
The privacy paradox describes people’s willingness to disclose personal information

on social network sites despite expressing high levels of concern. In this study, we
employ the distinction between institutional and social privacy to examine this
phenomenon. We investigate what strategies undergraduate students have developed,
and their motivations for using specific strategies. We employed a mixed-methods
approach that included 77 surveys and 21 in-depth interviews. The results
suggest that, in addition to using the default privacy settings, students have devel-
oped a number of strategies to address their privacy needs. These strategies are used
primarily to guard against social privacy threats and consist of excluding contact
information, using the limited profile option, untagging and removing photographs,
and limiting Friendship requests from strangers. Privacy strategies are geared toward
managing the Facebook profile, which we argue functions as a front stage. This
active profile management allows users to negotiate the need for connecting on Face-
book with the desire for increased privacy. Thus, users disclose information, because
they have made a conscious effort to protect themselves against potential violations.
We conclude that there is a tilt toward social privacy concerns. Little concern was
raised about institutional privacy and no strategies were in place to protect against
threats from the use of personal data by institutions. This is relevant for policy
discussions, because it suggests that the collection, aggregation, and utilization
of personal data for targeted advertisement have become an accepted social norm.
Keywords social network sites (SNSs); Facebook; information

revelation; Internet privacy; privacy protection strategies
(Received 29 September 2012; final version received 14 February 2013)
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 16, No. 4, May 2013, pp. 479 –500
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.777757
480 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
Introduction
The concept of Internet privacy has received considerable attention since the
increased collection of personal information online and the enhanced capabilities
for searching, tagging, and aggregating this information. One area of study that
has drawn particular attention is the provision of personal information on social
network sites (SNSs). There are two reasons for this increased interest. First,
SNSs represent a unique social sphere, where large amounts of personal infor-
mation are stored and aggregated (Govani & Pashley 2005). Second, data pro-
vided on these sites can easily be copied, forwarded, replicated, and taken out
of context (boyd 2006).
Internet users express significant concern about the release of personal infor-
mation in the online environment (Govani & Pashley 2005; Acquisti & Gross
2006). At the same time, and in apparent contradiction, users actively construct
their identity online through the disclosure of personal information (Sundén
2003; boyd 2008). Thus, there is a sharp disconnect between the concern
people express and their willingness to disclose personal information. This is
in line with what Barnes (2006) and Norberg et al. (2007) have identified as
the privacy paradox, a finding that has shown how despite expressing a
concern about Internet privacy, people often do very little to protect themselves.
The privacy paradox has been well-documented in the literature, with research-
ers consistently finding a contradiction between the privacy concerns that users
express and their disclosure of personal information on SNSs (Govani & Pashley
2005; Gross & Acquisti 2005; Tufecki 2008). Acquisti and Gross (2006), for
example, found that Facebook users reported higher levels of concern for
issues of privacy than for issues related to terrorism and the environment;
despite their concern, users continued to disclose personal information on Face-
book, including their birth dates, political views, and sexual orientation.
Users, however, are not necessarily naı̈ve in their disclosure practices. A
number of studies have emerged suggesting that users employ a wide range of
privacy protection strategies to address their concerns (Debatin et al. 2009;
Madden & Smith 2010; Stutzman et al. 2011; Dey et al. 2012). These strategies
range from simply untagging photos to more extensive deletion of content, to
blocking Friendship requests, and managing default privacy settings. This litera-
ture suggests that users are actively engaged in guarding their data and are not
passive users as originally suggested. There is, however, a gap in the literature
as to why SNS users choose specific privacy protection strategies over others,
and how these strategies address specific privacy needs.
To fill this gap, the present study employs Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) distinction
between social and institutional privacy to better describe the privacy protection
strategies that university students have developed to protect themselves from
potential privacy threats. We examine both the strategies made available
through the system, as well as those strategies that students have developed,
PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK 481
as they engage with their online community and become more avid users. Our
goal is to examine differences in social and institutional privacy in order to illus-
trate that a more nuanced understanding of privacy is necessary to help explain
why people disclose personal information despite their concerns.
Literature review
SNSs are traditionally defined as ‘spaces on the Internet where users can create a
profile and connect that profile to others to create a personal network’ (Lenhart
& Madden 2007, p. 1). While differences exist among the various contemporary
SNSs, a set of core features can be identified. First, users construct a profile
within the site, which provides personal information that can be used to help
the user find or be found by others to create a personal network. Second,
most sites allow anyone to join, while requiring user authorization before friend-
ship connections can be made. Finally, upon joining the service, new members
are usually asked to provide personal information, such as name, age, and
email address, as well as a picture of themselves and a self-description. Although
there are several different SNSs, some of the most popular include Facebook,
LinkedIn, and Google+ (Wasserman 2012).
The widespread adoption of SNSs has led many scholars and the media to
examine and raise pragmatic concerns about the disclosure of personal infor-
mation associated with participation in these sites (Gross & Acquisti 2005;
Barnes 2006; Govani & Pashley 2005; Klien 2006; Michaels 2006; Lenhart &
Madden 2007; Debatin et al. 2009; Young & Quan-Haase 2009; Madden &
Smith 2010). By their very nature and design, SNSs encourage users to disclose
substantial amounts of personal information, such as full name, birth date, and
sexual orientation. The popularity of these sites, according to boyd and Jenkins
(2006), lies in the users’ ability to converse with friends, develop a personal
image online, share digital cultural artifacts and ideas, and publicly articulate
their social networks. Despite the benefits accruing from the use of SNSs, the
disclosure of personal information on these sites has raised concerns about poten-
tial and real privacy risks.
Users actively construct their identity on SNSs through the disclosure of per-
sonal information (boyd 2008). Despite this apparent openness, research has
suggested that SNS users may not be completely naı̈ve in their disclosure prac-
tices; even though individuals disclose large quantities of personal information,
they take measures to protect themselves, and to address their privacy concerns.
For example, in 2008 danah boyd found that teenagers frequently used the
privacy settings to prevent parents from unwanted lurking. More recently,
research has shown increases in the use of protective measures among SNS
users, including greater use of privacy settings to restrict what information is
visible to others (Debatin et al. 2009; Madden & Smith 2010; Stutzman et al.
2011; Dey et al. 2012), the deletion of content and friends from one’s profile
(Robards 2010; Madden 2012), the creation of sub-set friends lists to establish
varying levels of privacy (Robards 2010), and the use of private modes of com-
munication, such as text messaging and Facebook chat, to discuss confidential,
embarrassing, or self-exposing content (boyd & Marwick 2011). The falsification
of information on SNSs also has been identified in the literature as a frequently
used privacy protection strategy (Lenhart & Madden 2007; Lampe et al. 2008;
Grubbs Hoy & Milne 2010).
Research has also shown that Facebook users manage their online personas
by removing information that might place them in a negative light (Lampe et al.
2008; Madden & Smith 2010). In a recent study for the PEW Internet and Amer-
ican Life Project, Madden and Smith (2010) revealed that users often manage
their reputation by untagging controversial or unflattering photos, or deleting
wall posts that depict them negatively. In particular, they found that nearly 50
percent of SNS users between the ages of 18 and 29 have deleted comments
friends have made on their profile wall, and approximately 40 percent have
untagged themselves (i.e. removed their names) from photos posted by
friends. Noting that users often perceive SNSs as public or semipublic spaces,
Brandtzæg et al. (2010) further suggest that SNS users manage their online per-
sonas through conformity – that is, sharing only a part of themselves in order to
maintain their social privacy as they interact with their different social ties within
the same confined space. This strategy enables users to engage with their entire
social network without being either too public or too private.
Research questions
Raynes-Goldie (2010) has suggested that the types of privacy concerns users
express likely influence their choice of privacy protection strategies. In particu-
lar, she contends that, while users care about protecting their personal infor-
mation, their concerns about privacy tend to reflect a desire to protect their
social privacy rather than their institutional privacy. In other words, SNS
users are more concerned about controlling who has access to their personal
information rather than how companies and third parties will use their infor-
mation. While a body of the literature has emerged examining the strategies
users have developed to address their privacy concerns on SNSs, it is unclear
whether these strategies are geared toward protecting their social or institutional
privacy. To fill this gap, the present study investigates the following two research
questions:
RQ 1: Are university student Facebook users more concerned about social

privacy or institutional privacy?
RQ 2: Are the privacy protection strategies developed by university student
Facebook users geared primarily toward protecting social privacy or toward

protecting institutional privacy?
A number of factors are likely to motivate SNS users to construct a private,

protected profile – that is, a profile that can only be accessed by select SNS friends.
Lewis et al. (2008) identified four factors that predict the likelihood of a student
having a private profile. First, students are more likely to have a private profile
if their friends – especially roommates – have private profiles; second, more
active Facebook users are more likely to have private profiles; third, female stu-
dents are more likely to have private profiles; and, fourth, students who prefer
popular music tend to be more likely to have private profiles. In line with
Lewis et al.’s (2008) finding that more active Facebook users tend to have
private profiles, boyd and Hargittai (2010) found that the level of Facebook engage-
ment has an impact on the use of privacy settings; Facebook users who are more
engaged are also more likely to modify their privacy settings on a frequent basis.
The expectation of a violation by weak ties has also been found to influence Face-
book users to enact a friends-only profile (Stutzman & Kramer-Duffield 2010).
Research has also found that individuals who have experienced a negative
social consequence as a result of their disclosure practices on Facebook are
more likely to alter their privacy settings. Strater and Lipford (2008), for
example, found that Facebook users who had experienced a privacy intrusion
from an unknown person had altered their profiles to ‘friends-only’ following,
and in response to, the violation. Debatin et al. (2009) also revealed that
people who use Facebook are significantly more likely to alter their privacy set-
tings following a negative personal experience than if they hear about a privacy
violation experienced by others. As a result, the motivation to alter or customize
privacy settings was found to be largely a direct result of an individual having
personally experienced a privacy invasion. This suggests that for some Facebook
users privacy is only a concern once they have experienced a negative conse-
quence as a result of their disclosures and lax privacy settings. Therefore,
their motivation to enact (stricter) privacy settings is to ensure that they do
not experience a similar violation in the future. Based on this prior research,
our third research question is:
RQ 3: What are the motivations for university students to use specific

privacy protection strategies on Facebook?
Methods
Participants
Participants were students from a research-intensive university in English
Canada. University students were chosen for three reasons: first, university
students are avid Internet users (Madden & Jones 2002; Zickuhr 2010) and
heavy users of SNSs (Lenhart et al. 2010; Zickuhr 2010). Second, university
students in North America are heavy users of social media (Quan-Haase &
Young 2010). Third, university students in general have free time and fairly
flexible schedules, allowing them to frequently log onto SNSs, update their
profile, and connect with peers and family. Not only do they engage in a
wider range of activities when conversing on SNSs, but they also perform
any one of these online activities more frequently than the general population
(Zickuhr 2010). Taking into consideration the uniqueness of university students

among users of SNSs, it is not surprising that extensive research has been done
on this population.
Participants for the survey were recruited from undergraduate classes in
communication studies. Eighty-five respondents were initially recruited;
however, the sample was reduced to 77 after non-users were removed from
the sample. We chose to exclude non-users because the focus of the study was
on how Facebook users protect themselves against potential privacy threats.
Respondents ranged in age from 17 to 25 years, with a mean age of 19.68
(SD ¼ 1.26). Seventy-one percent of respondents were female, which is 13
percent higher than the proportion of female university students in Canada in
the 2008 – 2009 academic year (Statistics Canada 2010), but representative of
the proportion of female students enrolled in the communication studies depart-
ment where participants were recruited.
Participants for the interviews were recruited through advertisements
posted on bulletin boards across campus. The interview sample consisted of
21 respondents, of whom 16 were female (76 percent). The majority of students
were enrolled in social sciences and humanities (48 percent), followed by phys-
ical sciences (24 percent), business (9 percent), and music (10 percent). Two stu-
dents were working on a combined degree (9 percent).
Procedures
Eighty-five students completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. Nineteen
respondents participated in a face-to-face interview, and two respondents
opted for an email-based interview. All interviews conducted face-to-face
were recorded and transcribed with participants’ consent.
During the interviews, profile analyses were conducted, which consisted of
asking the respondents to log onto Facebook and discuss the information revealed
in their profiles, the privacy settings they had in place, and the protective strategies
they had employed (Young et al. 2011). This afforded the respondents the oppor-
tunity to expand and elaborate on the information already provided in the inter-
views. The profile analysis showed that students were often unaware, or had
forgotten, what information they had disclosed and what privacy settings they
had enacted. By discussing the profiles in the presence of students, rather than
downloading them or only relying on questionnaire data (Govani & Pashley

2005; Gross & Acquisti 2005), we gained a better understanding of students’ dis-
closure and privacy behaviors (Young et al. 2011). It also enabled us to discuss (a)
the accuracy of the information, (b) why certain types of information but not
others were posted, and (c) the social meaning of the information included on
the profile.
Quantitative measures
Frequency of Facebook use. The questionnaire had five items measuring Facebook
usage. The first item was adopted from Lenhart and Madden (2007) and asked,
‘How often do you visit Facebook?’ The second item asked, ‘On average, how
much time did you spend every day on Facebook last week?’ The third item
asked participants to report on how long they have been using Facebook (they
reported months of usage). The fourth item, which consisted of five parts,
asked respondents to first report their total number of Facebook friends and
then indicate how many they considered close friends, acquaintances, distant
friends, and people only met on Facebook. The fifth item asked respondents
to indicate which of the four media they employed to communicate with
friends on Facebook: wall, group message, private message, and poke
(Lenhart & Madden 2007).
Privacy settings. Privacy settings were examined by asking respondents to

discuss to whom their profile is currently visible (profile visibility) and if
they had restricted access to their profile data (information visibility).
Respondents were asked the following question: ‘We’d like to know what
privacy settings (if any) you have activated. Have you made your information
visible to . . . ?’ Since the default privacy setting in 2007 was ‘all networks and
all friends’, we looked for any participants who had changed this default
setting to restrict profile access to either ‘some networks and all friends’ or
‘only friends’. The profile visibility measure was adopted from Lenhart and
Madden (2007).
Information visibility. We measured information visibility by examining

whether respondents had left their information visible to others or had
restricted their information visibility from within the site. Open visibility
was determined by merging ‘all network and all friends’ with ‘some networks
and all friends’, while restricted visibility was determined by merging ‘only
friends’ with ‘only me’. This measure was adopted from Govani and Pashley
(2005).
Privacy protection strategies. We measured privacy protection strategies by

asking respondents about a number of strategies they employed to protect
their data, for instance, ‘I have changed the default privacy settings activated by
Facebook.’ They were asked to rate the eight items on a 5-point Likert scale
ranging from 1 ¼ ‘strongly disagree’ to 5 ¼ ‘strongly agree’ (for item
wording see Table 2).
Friending practices. Friending practices were examined by asking respondents to

reflect on the last time a stranger contacted them on Facebook and requested to
be their friend. They were asked to select from one of six options: (1) ‘just
ignored the request for authorization or deleted the request for authorization’,
(2) ‘accepted the request for authorization so I could find out more information
about the person’, (3) ‘accepted the request for authorization and told them to
leave me alone’, (4) ‘reported the person to Facebook staff’, (5) ‘blocked the
person from contacting me’, and (6) ‘other’.
Interview schedule
The interviews were semi-structured using an interview guide designed to
examine university students’ privacy protection on Facebook. A semi-structured
interview technique was chosen to allow for focused, conversational, two-way
communication between the researcher and the participant (Legard et al.
2003; Babbie & Benaquisto 2009). In the interviews, we asked respondents to
discuss their general concern for online privacy and privacy on Facebook, and
whether or not they had encountered any negative experiences. We then
probed for the various strategies they had developed to address their privacy con-
cerns and to protect against potential violations. We probed for use of an ident-
ifiable profile image, if respondents excluded any personal information and their
reasons for exclusion, and if they had falsified any profile data. We also asked
respondents to discuss who currently has access to their profile, and if they
had blocked anyone from access.
Data analysis
We conducted descriptive statistics to obtain an overview of the privacy protec-
tion strategies used by university students. The qualitative data were analyzed
using the framework-based approach proposed by Ritchie et al. (2003). This con-
sisted of classifying and organizing the data into a thematic framework based on
key themes, concepts, and categories. The main themes were then subdivided
into a succession of related subtopics, and the data from each respondent
were synthesized and placed under the appropriate subtopic of the thematic fra-
mework. The data were also analyzed with Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) privacy dis-
tinctions in mind.
Results
Facebook use
University students are heavy Facebook users: 82 percent reported logging onto
Facebook ‘several times a day’ and using the site on average for about 3 hours and
48 minutes per week. At the time of the survey, students had been using Face-
book for approximately 1.5 years, and had an average of 401.62 Facebook
friends. Of these friends, the majority were considered acquaintances

(M ¼ 195.45, SD ¼ 127.44) rather than close friends (M ¼ 67.75;
SD ¼ 80.28). The same percentage of students reported using the wall (96.1
percent) as using private messaging (95 percent) for communication.
Privacy settings
Seventy-one percent of respondents altered the default privacy settings to either
‘friends-only’ or ‘some networks and all friends’. By contrast, 14 percent left the
default settings untouched, providing profile access to ‘all networks and all
friends’, while 8 percent chose to open their profiles to the entire Facebook
network (Figure 1).
Information visibility
Many respondents altered the visibility of their profile data: 79 percent regulated
access to tagged photos, 77 percent restricted access to their wall, and 71
percent limited access to their news feed.1 In some instances, students did not
know the visibility status of their information: for instance, 23 percent were
FIGURE 1 Profile visibility. This figure illustrates students’ use of profile visibility settings.
TABLE 1 Percentages for information visibility levels.
Restricted Unknown
visibility Open visibility visibility
N Percent N Percent N Percent
Tagged photos 61 79 12 16 4 5
Tagged videos 46 60 13 17 18 23
Status update 52 67 18 23 7 9
Friends 49 64 12 16 10 13
Wall 59 77 15 20 3 4
Courses 48 62 13 17 16 21
News feed 55 71 12 16 10 13
unsure if they had restricted access to their tagged photos (also see Young &
Quan-Haase 2009) (Table 1).
To further understand participants’ motivations for altering the visibility of
their profile and of their information, we conducted four correlations, which
examined the relationships between general concern for Internet privacy,
unwanted audiences, profile visibility, and information visibility. These analyses
revealed that concern about unwanted audiences was negatively associated with
information visibility; the greater the participants’ concern about unwanted
TABLE 2 Means and standard deviations for privacy protection strategy items.
Individual items M SD
1. I have sent private email messages within Facebook instead of posting 4.72 0.68
messages to a friend’s wall to restrict others from reading the message
2. I have changed the default privacy settings activated by Facebook 4.33 1.25
3. I have excluded personal information on Facebook to restrict people I don’t 4.08 1.17
know from gaining information about myself
4. I have untagged myself from images and/or videos posted by my contacts 3.85 1.55
5. I have deleted messages posted to my Facebook wall to restrict others from 3.64 1.55
viewing/reading the message
6. Certain contacts on my Facebook site only have access to my limited profile 3.47 1.70
7. I have blocked former contacts from contacting me and accessing my 2.91 1.71
Facebook profile
8. I have provided fake or inaccurate information on Facebook to restrict people I 1.66 1.03
don’t know from gaining information about me
Note: 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ¼ ‘strongly disagree’ to 5 ¼ ‘strongly agree’.
audiences, the less visible they made their profile information, r(48) ¼ 20.307,
p , 0.05. By contrast, the analyses showed no effect of concern for Internet
privacy on profile visibility, r(70) ¼ 20.146, p ¼ n.s., or information visibility,
r(69) ¼ 20.0.74, p ¼ n.s. Moreover, there was no association between concern
for unwanted audiences and profile visibility, r(48) ¼ 20.235, p ¼ n.s.
Privacy protection strategies

Protective strategies were further examined by asking respondents to indicate

the extent to which they agreed that they had used privacy protection strategies
to mitigate privacy threats. The results (depicted in Table 2) showed that univer-
sity students were more likely to exclude personal information to restrict
unknown others from accessing information (M ¼ 4.08; SD ¼ 1.17), to use
private email messages to restrict access to content (M ¼ 4.72; SD ¼ 0.68),
and to alter the default privacy settings (M ¼ 4.33; SD ¼ 1.25), than they
were to use fake or inaccurate information (M ¼ 1.66; SD ¼ 1.03) or to
block contacts (M ¼ 2.91; SD ¼ 1.71).
Friending practices
Participants reported on how they dealt with friendship requests from strangers:
62 percent of participants ‘ignored’ the request, 20 percent ‘accepted the request
to find out more information about the person’, 7 percent ‘blocked the person’,
8 percent indicated engaging in ‘other’ activities, 1 percent ‘reported person to
Facebook staff’, and 1 percent ‘accepted the request and asked person to leave
me alone’.
Results from interviews

We found that, based on either negative media accounts or their own negative
experiences, users have developed strategies to protect their privacy on Face-
book. We found that university students employ a wide range of strategies,
and that each strategy serves different privacy objectives. These objectives can
be understood in terms of Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) distinction between social
privacy (the concern about controlling access to personal data) and institutional
privacy (the concern about how third parties will use personal data). The inter-
views suggested that university students appear to be more concerned about
their social privacy than their institutional privacy and have primarily developed
strategies to mitigate social privacy concerns.
One way that users attempted to protect their social privacy was by using
the limited profile. The limited profile allowed users to restrict access to
profile data by predefined users or user groups. This Facebook feature has
since been replaced by the restricted list, which serves a similar function by
enabling users to limit the access of friends placed on this list only to information
that the user has made public to the general Facebook community. Justine, a
third year science major, reported placing her sister and their mutual friends
on a limited profile to restrict the amount of information her mother was
able to view. In this example, the limited profile enabled the user to both
control who had access to her profile information, as well as to maintain a
degree of separation between her different audiences.
Perhaps the most pervasive and relevant strategy was to delete photo tags.
Photo tags are hyperlinks that when applied to a photo, post a tagged version of
the photo to a user’s wall (or more recently their Timeline). Deleting photo tags,
therefore, removes the photo from the user’s profile; however, it does not
remove the original photo from the poster’s wall. Christine, a first year business
student, reported not only deleting photo tags to ensure that the photo was
removed from her own profile, but reported asking the poster to remove the
photo altogether. She explained:
I have a lot of family members on my Facebook account and, I mean, they

don’t want to see everything that goes on it. So, when someone tags a
picture of me and I’m not comfortable with it, I’ll untag it and ask them
to remove it altogether. I have one [negative] experience with one family
member who did come across a picture and it was “bad news.” So, I try
to do that [untag and remove photos] for the most part.
Christine, therefore, addressed her social privacy concerns by untagging

herself from photos and asking her friends to remove photos that she deemed
inappropriate for her family members to view.
Some respondents went one step further by changing the visibility of their
tagged photos to ‘only me’. This strategy restricted both unwanted known
others and unwanted unknown others from access to the photos. Cheryl, a
social science major explained:
I’d rather censor photos that people see of me. I mean if there is one of me
doing something bad like drinking underage, I’d like to be able to make sure
that I don’t have that on in case people can see my profile. I know that people
say that employers can see it and stuff, so just in case. Even though [my
profile is] private, I’d rather be safe than sorry.
From this comment, we begin to see that some students fear that despite
restricting their profile visibility to ‘only friends’, they believe that it may be
possible for unwanted audiences to still access their information from within
the site. In order to combat this possibility, Cheryl reported restricting others
from seeing her uploaded or tagged photos.
Other methods used to enhance social privacy were: the exclusion of contact
information (i.e. address and phone number); the use of a semi-concealed profile
image, which did not clearly disclose the identity of the participant, but that
would be recognizable by the participant’s friends if they were to search for
them on the site; and, altering the participant’s profile visibility, namely to
‘only friends’. In contrast to the other methods discussed above, these particular
methods were used predominantly to protect against violations from unknown
others.
Social privacy concerns also influenced participants’ friending practices on

Facebook. While the majority of participants reported receiving a friend
request from a stranger, very few had actually accepted the request. Most
respondents reported either ignoring or deleting the request if they did not
know the person making the friendship request. One respondent, however,
reported that in the event he did not recognize the person making the
request, he would send them a message and ask: ‘“Hey where do I know you
from?” and if they message back and verify, and I know that’s where I met
them, then I will add them.’ In this way, the participant used a validation
process to determine whether or not to accept friendship requests. This
process was used to ensure that only people he knew in an offline context
were added to his Facebook profile.
In line with this strategy, responses from the interviews showed that partici-
pants’ decisions to friend someone were overwhelmingly dependent on whether
or not they knew the requesters offline. One respondent suggested, ‘They have
to be someone that I’ve met,’ while another respondent reported that ‘[they
would have to be] someone I would recognize in the street, I guess, and
[would] be able to say hi to’. Thus, participants in our sample were cautious
about who they added to their Facebook profile, noting that they must know
the individual in some capacity offline before they will accept a request for friend-
ship online.
Respondents’ desire to protect their social privacy also influenced their com-
munication practices on Facebook, with respondents mentioning using private
messaging in Facebook when they wanted to share confidential information,
such as their address or phone number.
In line with previous research that suggests SNS users are motivated to enact
privacy settings because of a negative social consequence experienced from
online activities and disclosures (Strater & Lipford 2008; Debatin et al. 2009),
a few participants reported changing their behavior and altering their profile visi-
bility in response to a negative event on Facebook. In particular, one participant
reported on backlash he received from participation in a high school Facebook
group that was focused on criticizing and ridiculing a young female teacher at
his all-boys private school. He reported that although the Facebook group had
over 250 members, school administrators singled out students they deemed to
be role models, including him as Student Government President, and discussed
the possibility of legal action. While the school ultimately settled with the
teacher and no charges were laid, the participant noted that it was a frightening
experience that changed the way he interacted on Facebook, stating: ‘You second
guess everything you do now’. In response to the negative event, he reported
enacting stricter privacy settings, untagging, and removing inappropriate
photos, being more cautious about what he posted to friends’ walls, and being
more selective of which groups he joined and what invitations to social events
he accepted.
Only one participant in our interview sample expressed concern about insti-
tutional privacy, specifically with how her information might be used (or
misused) without her consent. She notes:
I am concerned with the fact that they own everything you put on there. I
would say that is my biggest concern. I think it’s highly unethical personally,
and I find when my friends post their writing or whatever the only thing I
comment is: “Facebook owns this, just so you know.”
This participant reported protecting her institutional privacy by excluding

information from Facebook that is not accessible elsewhere on the Web.
It is interesting to note that participants did not view the use of falsified
information to be a valid protective measure. That said, a few respondents
noted fictionalizing their ‘about me’ section in an effort to appear comical,
rather than intentionally deceitful. This practice is described in the following
quote: ‘I have an affinity for laughter and I wish to make anyone who reads
my [about me] section laugh. I assume that they know I could not have possibly
accomplished all those things that I have written.’ As this quote suggests, stu-
dents only post fictional information if they know that their friends will interpret
it as comical rather than deceitful.
Overview of key discoveries

In sum, the study has yielded three key findings. First, we find that university
students actively manipulate Facebook’s privacy settings in order to help them
manage their data. This includes not only altering the visibility of their profiles,
but also regulating access to personal information. Second, and in line with this,
we find that students’ data management strategies are geared towards addressing
social privacy concerns. Students in our sample expressed greater concerns about
social privacy than institutional privacy. They adopted privacy protection strat-
egies that would allow them to better control who in the Facebook network
would have access to their personal information, rather than strategies that
would enable them to restrict third parties from using their information.
Finally, our results suggest that university students do not use fictitious infor-
mation as a protective strategy. Students in our sample suggested that the use
of fictitious information in this way would be counter-productive, because friends

and peers would contest the validity of the information disclosed, and it could
also lead to unnecessary confusion.
Discussion
There has been much debate about how the use of SNSs has changed individuals’
perceptions of privacy (Gross & Acquisti 2005; Lampe et al. 2008; boyd & Har-
gittai 2010). In this study, we employed the privacy paradox framework to
examine what motivates university students to disclose information on Facebook
despite their expressed privacy concerns. Our results suggest that SNS users
employ a number of privacy protection strategies in order to mitigate privacy
threats, while still allowing them to disclose enough information to connect
with peers and friends on Facebook. Thus, SNS users disclose information
despite their privacy concerns, because they have made a conscious effort to
protect themselves against potential violations by establishing who is a part of
their Facebook network and who has access to their data.
Our main concern was to compare strategies associated with social and insti-
tutional privacy to better understand why SNS users choose specific privacy pro-
tection strategies over others, and how these strategies address their specific
privacy needs. The findings show a clear bias toward strategies that mitigate
social privacy threats. In accord with Raynes-Goldie (2010), for instance, partici-
pants reported deleting wall posts and photo tags to control who could see this
information in their Facebook network. Users also employed private messaging
as a means to communicate with Facebook friends, without this information
being broadcast to their entire network. We found that the greater the student’s
concern about unwanted audiences, the less visible they made their profile infor-
mation. Participants felt strongly about what information was included on their
personal profile, and they carefully and actively managed this part of their online
identity. By contrast, students were less concerned about undesired photos on
Facebook if they were not tagged in them, because these photos would not be
visible on their news feed. It would also prevent others from easily finding the
photos in a search, and hence, represented little to no risk to their privacy.
This suggests that the vast amount of information posted daily on Facebook
and other SNSs is perceived as a protection to personal privacy, because infor-
mation cannot be easily located.
Participants in the study showed much greater concern about controlling
access to their data than about how institutions may use or misuse their personal
information. This finding suggests that users have a better understanding of how
friends, family, and other individuals who are a part of their Facebook network
may threaten their privacy than of potential threats coming from institutions and
other third parties. Moreover, our participants showed little to no concern about
threats coming from Facebook and from companies that collect, record, and
aggregate data on the system. For policy makers, it suggests that more work
needs to be done to increase the transparency of what kinds of data are being
collected, how these are being aggregated, and how they are utilized to target
such features as ads, customized information, friendship recommendations,
and posts. Elli Pariser (2011) describes the application of profile data and user
behavior to customize user experience in SNS profiles, potentially creating a
filter bubble. For these users, data aggregation and targeted advertisement is a
normalized part of our society and the price we pay for accessing free services,
such as Facebook. This tilt toward social privacy concerns is relevant when it
comes to policy because it suggests that the collection and use of personal
data for targeted advertisement has become a part of our society’s social
norms. Social norms around privacy and data mining are evolving as people con-
tinue to engage in networked digital spaces, such as Facebook.
The results suggest that privacy protection must be studied with a more
nuanced understanding of privacy. Symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1986)
offers one way to further examine the activities of SNS users by defining an indi-
vidual’s actions in terms of action and reaction. This concept may help explain
why participants show higher concern for social privacy than institutional
privacy. Privacy is maintained within a constant social exchange, where the
self is presented and put on display, and where reactions from Facebook
friends toward that display are assessed. As individuals continue to present infor-
mation about the self on these sites, they carefully examine the reactions from
others in their network. This monitoring helps explain why SNS users are
aware of the consequences of sharing information on these sites and need to
deal with and confront reactions to their postings from other network
members. By contrast, there is little interaction with institutions or companies
that manage this information. Perhaps this lack of direct interaction, paired
with little transparency, prevents users from understanding the implications of
institutional privacy for the information they share.
The results of our study illustrate that university students have developed a
variety of protective measures to mitigate their privacy concerns and to guard
against potential social privacy invasions. The quantitative results show that the
strategies used most often are the exclusion of personal information from profiles,
the use of private email messaging, and the alteration of default privacy settings.
Participants were also likely to alter their information visibility in order to
protect against intrusions from unwanted audiences. In the interviews, we
found the strategies employed were linked to specific privacy concerns and were
influenced mainly by a desire to mitigate threats to social privacy (Raynes-
Goldie 2010). In particular, those students who were concerned about protecting
their social privacy mentioned: untagging or removing photographs, making use of
the limited profile, altering the default privacy settings, using a semi-concealed
photo, excluding contact information, friending only individuals they could
place in an offline setting, and sending private messages when sharing confidential
information via Facebook. Hence, university students are not naı̈ve in their disclos-
ure practices, because they have developed a number of strategies to protect
against social privacy threats, which allow them to negotiate the desire for
privacy, on the one hand, with the need for socialization and information disclosure
on the other hand. Furthermore, these findings point to the inadequacy of the
system-provided privacy settings in addressing all user privacy needs because
users have developed additional strategies to address their concerns.
In line with previous research, we found that negative social consequences

had an effect on participants’ behaviors and privacy practices (Strater &
Lipford 2008). Individuals who had experienced a negative event as a result of
their activities and disclosures on Facebook reported changing how they inter-
acted on Facebook to avoid similar future events. This finding suggests partici-
pants’ motivations for using specific privacy strategies stem both from a need
to protect themselves against privacy threats before they occur, and from a
desire to protect against future privacy violations.
Interestingly, we found that in contrast to previous research (Lenhart &
Madden 2007; Lampe et al. 2008), university students do not perceive the use
of fake or inaccurate information to be a useful protective measure. Indeed,
our participants considered the falsification of profile data to be impractical
and confusing, because their friends and peers would question the validity of
the information disclosed. As other researchers have noted, the public display
of one’s connections serves as verification of the reliability of identity claims,
ensuring that profile information is accurate and/or playful and ironic, rather
than intentionally deceitful (Donath & boyd 2004; Lampe et al. 2007; see also
Donath 2007 on signaling theory). As such, Facebook’s structure – that is,
the fact that individuals’ connections are linked to their profile – encourages
users to reveal truthful information on the site.
Understanding the development of and motivations for privacy protection
strategies on Facebook is important for a number of reasons. First, these new
insights can assist in the development of privacy policies that more adequately
reflect the practices and needs of Facebook users. In particular, understanding
the types of concerns that motivate individuals to adopt specific strategies can
help identify areas in need of greater attention. For instance, our results
showed that students are primarily concerned about protecting their social
privacy and have therefore, developed a number of strategies to mitigate their
concerns. Thus, privacy policies, particularly from an educational perspective,
may want to focus greater attention on the issues of institutional privacy to
ensure students understand the implications of using Facebook on both social
and institutional privacy.
Second, an improved understanding of the privacy paradox has implications
for design. Similar to the development of privacy policies that greater reflect the
needs and practices of users, assessing how users protect themselves on Facebook
can help inform the development of privacy controls that more closely mirror
the actual privacy strategies employed by users. Some of these strategies have
recently been integrated into Facebook. For example, unless otherwise specified,
users now have to accept tagged photos and comments before they are posted to
their wall (also known as the Facebook Timeline). This helps ensure that photos
and comments are not viewable by others until the user has approved the content
as acceptable.
The use of profile analyses – having students go through their Facebook
profile with the researcher and discuss the decisions made about their privacy set-
tings – was advantageous because we were able to avoid two issues associated with
reliance on solely self-report data (Young et al. 2011). First, this method serves as a
data verification tool. Participants may have forgotten their current settings, or
may have difficulty accurately recalling the settings they implemented last, particu-
larly given that Facebook changes its settings so frequently. It is also possible that
participants may have forgotten what personal information they have disclosed on
their profile. Second, profile analysis avoids problems associated with social desir-
ability, whereby participants tell what they think, the researcher wants to hear.
Profile analyses have implications for the design of future research studies, as
this method can be used to verify the accuracy of users’ online behavior and
also to elicit further explanations and conversations.
Limitations and future work
The present study has some limitations. First, the findings are based on a small
and non-representative sample. We recruited participants for the survey primar-
ily from media and communications majors, which is a group that could poten-
tially be biased in their use of social media. Second, the results of the study can
only be generalized to university students. Future research could seek to expand
the research by examining other user groups, such as high school or elementary
school students, to see if their privacy protection strategies differ from those of
university students. Third, Facebook privacy settings have changed since the data
were collected. Future research could re-examine the strategies university stu-
dents use in light of these changes, particularly with regards to the implemen-
tation of the Facebook Timeline and Facebook’s integration with sites external
to the Facebook platform.
Note
1 The news feed is a tool that reports all activities undertaken by a user,
such as adding or deleting applications or features, status updates,
changes in relationship status, etc.
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Alyson L. Young is a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at the Uni-

versity of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses primarily on the
uses and impact of information and communication technologies on the lives
and practices of individuals, communities, and organizations. Address: UMBC,
Information Systems, 1000 Hilltop Circle, ITE 404, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA.
[email: alyson.leigh.young@gmail.com]
Anabel Quan-Haase is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information
and Media Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of
Western Ontario. Her research examines how digital technologies have affected
social networks and identifies what factors affect network structure, creation,
and maintenance over time in physical and digital spaces.

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Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK

Alyson Leigh Young & Anabel Quan-Haase

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.777757

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Download by: [UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL] Date: 16 November 2017, At: 22:31

PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES

The Internet privacy paradox revisited

The privacy paradox describes people’s willingness to disclose personal information

Keywords social network sites (SNSs); Facebook; information

(Received 29 September 2012; final version received 14 February 2013)

RQ 1: Are university student Facebook users more concerned about social

Facebook users geared primarily toward protecting social privacy or toward

A number of factors are likely to motivate SNS users to construct a private,

RQ 3: What are the motivations for university students to use specific

(Zickuhr 2010). Taking into consideration the uniqueness of university students

downloading them or only relying on questionnaire data (Govani & Pashley

Privacy settings. Privacy settings were examined by asking respondents to

Information visibility. We measured information visibility by examining

Privacy protection strategies. We measured privacy protection strategies by

Friending practices. Friending practices were examined by asking respondents to

friends. Of these friends, the majority were considered acquaintances

TABLE 1 Percentages for information visibility levels.

N Percent N Percent N Percent

Privacy protection strategies

Protective strategies were further examined by asking respondents to indicate

Results from interviews

I have a lot of family members on my Facebook account and, I mean, they

Christine, therefore, addressed her social privacy concerns by untagging

Social privacy concerns also influenced participants’ friending practices on

This participant reported protecting her institutional privacy by excluding

Overview of key discoveries

of fictitious information in this way would be counter-productive, because friends

In line with previous research, we found that negative social consequences

Limitations and future work

Donath, J. & boyd, D. (2004) ‘Public displays of connection’, BT Technology Journal,

Digital Library (25 June 2007)

news/articles/2006/04/08/future_employers.php (5 August 2007).

Sundén, J. (2003) Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment, Peter

Young, A. L. & Quan-Haase, A. (2009) ‘Information revelation and Internet privacy

Alyson L. Young is a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at the Uni-

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