Community-based question answering (CQA) platforms are crowd-sourced services for sharing user expertise on various topics, from mechanical repairs to parenting. While they naturally build-in an online social network infrastructure, they carry a very different purpose from Facebook-like social networks, where users "hang-out" with their friends and tend to share more personal information. It is unclear, thus, how the privacy concerns and their correlation with user behavior in an online social network translate into a CQA platform. This study analyzes one year of recorded traces from a mature CQA platform to understand the association between users' privacy concerns as manifested by their account settings and their activity in the platform. The results show that privacy preference is correlated with behavior in the community in terms of engagement, retention, accomplishments and deviance from the norm. We find privacy-concerned users have higher qualitative and quantitative contributions, show higher retention, report more abuses, have higher perception on answer quality and have larger social circles. However, at the same time, these users also exhibit more deviant behavior than the users with public profiles.
A number of studies @cite_19 @cite_38 @cite_13 on social networks like Facebook have shown the correlation between users' self-reported privacy concerns and their self-reported behavior. For example, @cite_2 showed that users who express concerns on Facebook privacy controls and find it difficult to comprehend sharing practices also report less engagement such as visiting, commenting, and liking content. At the same time, users who report more control and comprehension of privacy settings and their consequences are more engaged with the platform. Similarly, the frequency of visits, type of use, and general Internet skills are shown to be related to the personalization of the default privacy settings @cite_19 . Acquisti and Gross' @cite_3 survey on Facebook finds that a user's privacy concerns are only a weak predictor of his joining the network: that is, despite expressing privacy concerns, users join the network and reveal great amounts of personal information. @cite_39 used surveys and interviews on Facebook users to show that Internet privacy concerns and information revelation are negatively correlated. Tufekci's study @cite_27 on a small sample (704) of college students shows that students on Facebook and Myspace manage privacy concerns by adjusting profile visibility but not by restricting the profile information.
@cite_38 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_13
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We describe survey results from a representative sample of 1,075 U. S. social network users who use Facebook as their primary network. Our results show a strong association between low engagement and privacy concern. Specifically, users who report concerns around sharing control, comprehension of sharing practices or general Facebook privacy concern, also report consistently less time spent as well as less (self-reported) posting, commenting and "Like"ing of content. The limited evidence of other significant differences between engaged users and others suggests that privacy-related concerns may be an important gate to engagement. Indeed, privacy concern and network size are the only malleable attributes that we find to have significant association with engagement. We manually categorize the privacy concerns finding that many are nonspecific and not associated with negative personal experiences. Finally, we identify some education and utility issues associated with low social network activity, suggesting avenues for increasing engagement amongst current users. We measure users' attitudes toward interpersonal privacy concerns on Facebook and measure users' strategies for reconciling their concerns with their desire to share content online. To do this, we recruited 260 Facebook users to install a Facebook application that surveyed their privacy concerns, their friend network compositions, the sensitivity of posted content, and their privacy-preserving strategies. By asking participants targeted questions about people randomly selected from their friend network and posts shared on their profiles, we were able to quantify the extent to which users trust their "friends" and the likelihood that their content was being viewed by unintended audiences. We found that while strangers are the most concerning audience, almost 95 of our participants had taken steps to mitigate those concerns. At the same time, we observed that 16.5 of participants had at least one post that they were uncomfortable sharing with a specific friend---someone who likely already had the ability to view it---and that 37 raised more general concerns with sharing their content with friends. We conclude that the current privacy controls allow users to effectively manage the outsider threat, but that they are unsuitable for mitigating concerns over the insider threat---members of the friend network who dynamically become inappropriate audiences based on the context of a post. Despite concerns raised about the disclosure of personal information on social network sites, research has demonstrated that users continue to disclose personal information. The present study employs surveys and interviews to examine the factors that influence university students to disclose personal information on Facebook. Moreover, we study the strategies students have developed to protect themselves against privacy threats. The results show that personal network size was positively associated with information revelation, no association was found between concern about unwanted audiences and information revelation and finally, students' Internet privacy concerns and information revelation were negatively associated. The privacy protection strategies employed most often were the exclusion of personal information, the use of private email messages, and altering the default privacy settings. Based on our findings, we propose a model of information revelation and draw conclusions for theories of identity expression. We performed a laboratory experiment to study the privacy tradeoff offered by Facebook Connect: disclosing Facebook profile data to third-party websites for the convenience of logging in without creating separate accounts. We controlled for trustworthiness and amount of information each website requested, as well as the consent dialog layout. We discovered that these factors had no observable effects, likely because participants did not read the dialogs. Yet, 15 still refused to use Facebook Connect, citing privacy concerns. A likely explanation for subjects ignoring the dialogs while also understanding the privacy tradeoff - our exit survey indicated that 88 broadly understood what data would be collected - is that subjects were already familiar with the dialogs prior to the experiment. We discuss how our results demonstrate informed consent, but also how habituation prevented subjects from understanding the nuances between individual websites' data collection policies.