C.G. Lynch of CIO magazine examines the business implications of the shifting nature of privacy in social networks. He draws on research that Jacob Kramer-Duffield and I ran last fall:
But it turns out some users have fiddled with those privacy settings, after all. In research conducted by the UNC School of Information and Library Science this past fall, more than 70 percent of 495 college students surveyed claimed to have altered their Facebook privacy settings in some way. Around half of the students also said they limited access to their profile to “friends only.”
The research also indicates that their attention to privacy controls increases with their time on the service. During their first six months on Facebook, only 40 percent of students said they modified their privacy settings. After one year, that number jumped to nearly 80 percent.
It is a great article – I’ve spoken with Chris a few times and he’s an astute analyst of social networks. The article has good quotes from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s smart Chief Privacy Officer.
As I mentioned in a post last week, Jacob and I are currrently writing this study up for publication. We presented initial results at the ASIST Annual Meeting, but we hope to get this into journal form so we can share the results more broadly.
