An investigation into facebook friend grouping

  • Authors:
  • Patrick Gage Kelley;Robin Brewer;Yael Mayer;Lorrie Faith Cranor;Norman Sadeh

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University;University of Maryland;Harvey Mudd College;Carnegie Mellon University;Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • INTERACT'11 Proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part III
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

With increasingly large friend networks, Facebook users may be losing sight of exactly with whom they are sharing content they post to Facebook. When Facebook released a new privacy interface in sum- mer 2010 they simplified privacy controls; however, group-based permis- sions remain at the core of fine-grained privacy control. In order to use these fine-grained controls, users must be able to accurately and usefully specify friend groups. In a series of 46 semi-structured interviews, we investigated how participants group their online friends using four differ- ent grouping methods. Our results show that these different mechanisms alter the strategies and groups that users create, that groups created a priori need further refinement before they can adequately address pri- vacy decisions, and that users are adapting their online behavior to avoid the need to specify groups in the current Facebook interface. We con- clude with several recommendations that would allow users improved group-based access control.