Privacy implications of privacy settings and tagging in Facebook

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. Users share personal information about themselves and other users in order to build and maintain their social network. However, the large amount of personal information available on social networks poses risks of data misuse. Although social networks offer users the possibility to specify privacy settings to regulate access to their information, these settings are often complicated and unintuitive, especially when dealing with new modalities of social communication like tagging. In this paper we investigate the privacy consequences of information sharing in social networks. In particular, we formally analyze the impact of the privacy settings and the use of tagging in Facebook on the visibility of information. To increase users’ awareness of the risks of information sharing and empower users to control their information, we present a tool for determining the visibility of users’ information based on their privacy settings and tagging.