Understanding How People Weigh the Costs and Benefits of using Facebook

Jack McClary, Sid Stamm

2021

Abstract

Much work in privacy focuses on educating a system’s users so they will be better armed to take action based on the benefits and drawbacks of how their data is treated. Intuitively, this makes sense; one may expect people who perceive more benefit than risk in a system will elect to use it, but our research shows that is commonly not the case. We surveyed users of a social network to quantify what they perceive as the benefits and drawbacks of the platform. Given their net “value” perceived, we would have expected those who see mostly drawbacks (or a net cost) in its use to abandon the platform for a more privacy-preserving alternative. What we found was that only 62% of individuals we surveyed acted so rationally—the remainder either chose to use a platform they felt had a negative impact on their life, or chose to abandon one that served them favorably. This result indicates there are strong factors beyond rational cost/benefit analysis that lead people to decide what social platforms they use. This means that privacy professionals must focus not only on building transparency and choice, but also constructing viable alternatives so people do not feel pressured into using a platform they see as a net loss of personal privacy.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

McClary J. and Stamm S. (2021). Understanding How People Weigh the Costs and Benefits of using Facebook.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-491-6, pages 526-533. DOI: 10.5220/0010258405260533

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp21,
author={Jack McClary and Sid Stamm},
title={Understanding How People Weigh the Costs and Benefits of using Facebook},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2021},
pages={526-533},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010258405260533},
isbn={978-989-758-491-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Understanding How People Weigh the Costs and Benefits of using Facebook
SN - 978-989-758-491-6
AU - McClary J.
AU - Stamm S.
PY - 2021
SP - 526
EP - 533
DO - 10.5220/0010258405260533