 Privacy in Social Networks

Facebook Background  Biggest social network with 1 billion users  Most information defaults to public

Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Frictionless Sharing

Take this Lollipop 

Pinterest  Social Image Bookmarking  Users curate collections of images on “boards”  Experienced very fast growth  1 million unique users in January 2011  12 million unique users in January 2012

FourSquare  Location-based services and sharing  Lets you “checkin” at stores, offices, monuments, airports, your girlfriend’s house, etc.  Example of larger location-sharing movement in social media  Facebook, Twitter allow checkins now

Checkins and Data

Twitter Background  Microblogging service  Accessible over the web or mobile devices  Users post 140-character “tweets”  Follow the tweets of others  200 million active users  About 40% only read content (no posts)

Please Rob Me

Profiling People and Relationships  What are more advanced ways to use social media data?  Understanding “hidden” traits of people and their relationships

What we can find out  Using information from Facebook or Twitter, researchers can accurately guess your  Age  Race  Gender  Sexual Orientation  Socioeconomic Status  Drug and alcohol use  Religion  and more

Results from one Study Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Take-away message  People share vast amounts of information about themselves, their relationships, and their activities online  Using social media profiles, we can  Gain interesting insights about what people say and do  Compute information about people and their relationships