Charalampos Z. PATRIKAKIS, Dimitrios G. KOGIAS, Serap ŞAHİN, Burcu SAYİN

Privacy issues in post dissemination on Facebook

With social networks (SNs) being populated by a still increasing numbers of people who take advantage ofthe communication and collaboration capabilities that they offer, the probability of the exposure of people’s personalmoments to a wider than expected audience is also increasing. By studying the functionalities and characteristics thatmodern SNs offer, along with the people’s habits and common behaviors in them, it is easy to understand that severalprivacy risks may exist, many of which people may be unaware of. In this paper, we focus on users’ interactions with postsin a social network (SN), using Facebook as our research domain, and we emphasize some privacy leakages currentlyexisting in Facebook’s privacy policy. We also propose a solution to detected privacy issues, featuring a referenceimplementation of a tool based on a simulation, which visualizes the effect of potential privacy risks on Facebook anddirects users to control their privacy. The proposed and simulated tool allows a post owner to observe the spreading areaof his or her post depending on the selected privacy settings. Moreover, it provides preliminary feedback for all Facebookusers that have interacted with this post, to make them aware of the possible privacy changes, aiming to give them achance to protect the privacy of their interaction on this post by deleting it when an unwanted privacy change takesplace. Finally, an online survey to increase privacy awareness in Facebook usage with over 500 volunteer participantshas illuminated the need for such a tool or solution.

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