Learning from Online Regrets: From Deleted Posts to Risk Awareness in Social Network Sites
This work addresses privacy risks for social media users by leveraging user-generated data to improve risk awareness, though it is incremental in building on existing risk awareness strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of users regretting sharing private information on social networks by introducing a method that uses deleted posts to measure self-disclosure risks, resulting in a risk criticality index that can be applied to design adaptive privacy nudges.
Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook or Instagram are spaces where people expose their lives to wide and diverse audiences. This practice can lead to unwanted incidents such as reputation damage, job loss or harassment when pieces of private information reach unintended recipients. As a consequence, users often regret to have posted private information in these platforms and proceed to delete such content after having a negative experience. Risk awareness is a strategy that can be used to persuade users towards safer privacy decisions. However, many risk awareness technologies for SNSs assume that information about risks is retrieved and measured by an expert in the field. Consequently, risk estimation is an activity that is often passed over despite its importance. In this work we introduce an approach that employs deleted posts as risk information vehicles to measure the frequency and consequence level of self-disclosure patterns in SNSs. In this method, consequence is reported by the users through an ordinal scale and used later on to compute a risk criticality index. We thereupon show how this index can serve in the design of adaptive privacy nudges for SNSs.