Self-reflection on privacy research in social networking sites

ABSTRACT

The increasing popularity of social networking sites has been a source of many privacy concerns. To mitigate these concerns and empower users, different forms of educational and technological solutions have been developed. Developing and evaluating such solutions, however, cannot be considered a neutral process. Instead, it is socially bound and interwoven with norms and values of the researchers. In this contribution, we aim to make the research process and development of privacy solutions more transparent by highlighting questions that should be considered. (1) Which actors are involved in formulating the privacy problem? (2) Is privacy perceived as a human right or as a property right on one’s data? (3) Is informing users of privacy dangers always a good thing? (4) Do we want to influence users’ attitudes and behaviours? (5) Who is the target audience? We argue that these questions can help researchers to better comprehend their own perspective on privacy, that of others, and the influence of the solutions they are developing. In the discussion, we propose a procedure called ‘tool clinics’ for further practical implementations.

KEYWORDS:

• Social networking sites
• privacy
• self-reflection
• human rights
• science and technology studies
• tool clinics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The name of the project is omitted for the purpose of double-blind reviewing.

2. Latour (1992) proposed to conceive technologies as humans with whom we interact and shape our everyday actions. When designers develop technologies, they delegate certain tasks that were previously assigned to humans or other technologies. In turn, these technologies impose certain behaviours on humans, and they delegate prescription, that is, instructions on how to act, and thereby the moral and ethical dimension of technologies.

3. It should be noted that security experts, of course, can also be users and express social privacy-related problems. Users may also express their concern towards information gathering and processing. Moreover, both institutional and social privacy are strongly intertwined. For example, third parties need to adopt users’ information in a manner that is consistent with the privacy policy and users’ privacy preferences. To unravel the complexity of online privacy, however, we find it is necessary to reduce complexity and differentiate between the actors and relationships involved.

4. Samuelson (2000) gives a good summarization of these positions and outlines some problems with them.

5. Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31995L0046:en:HTML

6. Foucault ([1976] 1979), for example, questioned self-alienation when arguing that the age of reason forces people to be reflective all of the time. Internalizing such an idea leads to a constant questioning of one’s own behaviour and makes people think about their own actions, rather than act in the first place.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the IWT [100048]. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Strategic Basic Research (SBO) Program of the Flemish Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT) in the context of the SPION project under grant agreement number 100048.