aware of their online environment, the available pri-
vacy settings and the meaning of those settings.
In this regard, a clear understanding of user per-
spectives about their online privacy protection can
help to explain why users who are conscious about
privacy may have difficulty to manage their privacy
settings, and why many users could not set default pri-
vacy settings appropriately when sharing their infor-
mation with friends. For example, one study (Bosh-
maf, 2011) revealed that on average, 80% of Face-
book users accepted friend request from a person
whom they know very little about, even if they and
stranger have more than 11 mutual friends. Such
study raised the awareness of significant privacy risks,
since accepting friend requests from strangers can
easily lead to disclosure of personal information to
adversary, someone who collects user personal infor-
mation for bad intensions. Another study (Liu, 2011)
has found that OSN (e.g., Facebook ) privacy settings
match users expectations only 37% of the time, indi-
cating that for most of the time, the available OSN
privacy settings are inappropriate.
There have been a number of previous studies
(Xiao and Tao, 2006; Netter, 2013; Liu, 2011; Made-
jski et al., 2012; Beato and Peeters, 2014) on privacy
settings of online social networks. Most of these stud-
ies (Liu, 2011; Johnson et al., 2012; Madejski et al.,
2012; Fang and LeFevre, 2010; Miltgen and Peyrat-
Guillard, 2014) were based on small samples involv-
ing 200 to 300 individuals. It is not clear if the results
of these studies can be generalized. Another aspect of
these studies is that they focused on privacy risks in-
volving adversaries outside of OSNs and did not con-
sider privacy risks that might involve people inside the
OSNs, such as people in friends network. In addition,
no previous study has analyzed privacy issues with re-
spect to user demographics. This is a shortcoming be-
cause user perspective regarding online privacy may
depend on their gender, age, and cultural background.
Finally, previous studies investigated privacy settings
of Facebook, but no research has considered other
significant OSNs such as Google+, Linkedln, Twit-
ter, RenRen, WeChat, MySpace, and Hi5. The results
of these studies may not be applicable to other OSNs
due to the differences among these OSNs in terms of
sizes, user types, social activities, relationship types,
and privacy settings.
In this paper, we report on a study of user perspec-
tives about OSN privacy issues that includes multiple
OSNs. In this study, we designed a set of questions
aimed to learn about user views of online privacy,
user knowledge about OSNs privacy settings, and user
awareness of privacy disclosure. Our goal is to find
out from the users themselves whether and how well
users are knowledgable of, satisfied with, and able to
effectively use available privacy settings. The infor-
mation obtained from this study can be used to help
OSNs adjust their privacy settings to better match user
expectations, and help privacy advocates design bet-
ter ways to help users control the disclosure of their
online information. We collected answers to the ques-
tions from a group of 377 users, selected via several
methods, who have experiences with multiple OSNs,
including Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. We ana-
lyzed the data with respect to user demographics. Our
study shows that 44% of the users lack the knowledge
about privacy policies and mechanisms of their OSNs;
34% and 41% of the users, respectively, are seriously
and somewhat concern about their privacy protection;
and 80% of the users do not think their OSNs have
provided sufficient privacy control or default privacy
settings that match their expectations. Based on our
analysis, we propose several options for OSNs and
OSN users to improve the user privacy.
The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows. In Section 2, we briefly discuss previous works
related to our study. In Section 3, we describe our sur-
vey method including the design of questions and the
selection of correspondents. In Section 4, we analyze
the survey results and provide our recommendations.
Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper.
2 RELATED WORKS
In this section, we briefly describe some research
work related to our study.
Tucker et al. (Tucker, 2014) investigated how the
perceived control of users over their personal infor-
mation affects the likelihood that they will click ads
on a social networking website. Their found that
0.03% of users are likely to click advertisements that
claim to improve user privacy settings.
Park et al. (Park et al., 2014) developed a frame-
work to provide trusted data management in OSNs.
They provided an approach for users to determine
their optimum levels of information sharing. How-
ever, it is not clear how users can determine whether
they are appropriately protected by online social net-
works.
Liu et al. (Liu, 2011) compared the desired and
the actual privacy settings of 200 Facebook users.
They defined a measure of the inconsistency between
desired and actual privacy settings, and surveyed the
users to learn the inconsistency of their privacy set-
tings. The study found that almost 36% of users
keep their default privacy settings and for only 37%
of time, the default privacy settings match user ex-
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